The CALM Act.
I really didn’t think I’d see a lot about it but it seems
the CALM act is everywhere. Yes, today’s the deadline for implementation and,
no doubt, tomorrow the Notices of Apparent Liability will start flying.
I’ll be up-front with you:
I’ve written about this before and about the futility of passing laws
about anything that starts with “psycho”, in this case, psychoacoustics,
especially when trying to rely on machines to control the outcome. Might as well outlaw a disease; in a similar vein, it doesn’t
matter since physics behaves as it does and doesn’t pay much attention to congress.
More on that later. I
want to discuss this little thing called compliance. You see, not only must stations comply with
the rules, they must document their compliance.
A number of operations maintain programming for 90 days after
airing. Others, as much as 2 years.
The 90 days is the minimum retention period and during that
time, the station must be able to provide any segment of the broadcast day to
an inspector or government representative should they request it.
That means that if a viewer challenges a telecast – maybe
he/she heard a commercial that was too loud – the commission can come back and
say, “Give us 5 minutes on either side of the commercial and the commercial,
itself. Oh, and send the log of the dialnorm
on the audio.” Huh? Yep.
You have to be able to step up and provide the data/metadata that
supports your claim that you were legal at the time.
Stations are keeping the logs for longer and longer periods
because of the possibility of complaint.
But wait, there’s more. It’s not
just CALM compliance. It’s everything else. Closed captioning? You don’t want to be challenged. Political ads? Same thing.
Contests and all else, too. You
really want to be able to pull up the goods, send ‘em off to the commission
with a note like, “See?!”
That’s a “fur piece” as Bob Shreve used to say on the SchoenlingAll-Night Theater, from the old audio or VHS loggers. It requires much more. And, son of a gun, there are a couple of
devices out there that’ll do it and more.
Last nite, a bunch of us got the inside scoop from Ken
Dillard at Digital Nirvana, Inc. Now I
don’t know how they decided on that name – maybe it means somebody with all 1’s
on their bank account number. That
aside, these guys make the Monitor IQ box.
Yes, there are others out there.
This box is particularly intriguing.
It can do it all. And more. Ken explained how it integrates with sales, programming,
legal, and engineering. First, you can
watch all the stations in the market.
Then, as it archives, you can pull up any segment and look at it –
content, captioning, CALM, and (in metered markets) ratings.
You have to think about watching a sportscast running
against other stations in the market and easily spotting what keeps folks
around and what drives them away…overnight.
This is not a cheap box, but given all the new rules and the fines that
can be incurred, it’s cheap insurance.
And now for my favorite topic: the audio, itself. Let’s all pick dialnorm -24. Cool.
Our processors are going to take everything to -24. That’s cool, too, but, first do they really know what’s going on around
them? When Martha and John are
whispering sweet nothings on the porch swing, should the processing really take
the following commercial down to that level?
As it brings it up, it creates a different mood. Is that OK with the advertiser? How does it change the spot? And what happens to the louder one after
it? Oh, and did I pay for a particular
level of modulation when I bought the commercial time?
Let’s go farther.
What if (as I’ve written about before) the mix has an overabundance of
highs or lows? What are you going to
do? The system says dialog is the
benchmark. Well, just the simplest look at an oscilloscope
while listening to dialog tells you that there isn’t a 1:1 relationship between
the actual power in a piece of audio and the apparent loudness. But that’s exactly what we’re asking a
processor to look for and act upon.
So, when that 5.1 mix comes barreling through and totally
masks the dialog, what’s going to give?
Well, as they say in the retirement home, “Depends.”
And that means that every mix is different and it’ll be the
psychoacoustic elements that will cue the viewer as to whether the sound is
balanced from scene to scene. Once
again, you can process it like crazy but until you can teach the machine to
listen like a human, it’s going to get it wrong a good part of the time. Check the link below. Read it closely. If you don’t see any problems, you didn’t
read it closely!
And when you realize that most of the ATSC parameters for
CALM and dialnorm are based on those developed in Europe (including France, the
folks that gave us SECAM), you also know that it means stations will be
compliant – and still sound bad. How do
I know? Take a trip to London, Frankfurt
or Rome. Listen. Case closed.
But, compliance is the goal so, congratulations to all the
techs who have been slaving over the past months to get their stations to that
point. We’ll be listening...on receivers...all of which will vary and will interpret audio and its metadata differently, thereby creating a [vastly] different listening experience for each receiver owner.
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