Why Skins is better than Skins
Posted by: Rowan in Personal Blog, tags: Reviews, Skins, TV
Over the last ten weeks I’ve been watching series 3 of Skins, E4’s acclaimed teenage drama. The problem is, whilst it’s been entertaining, it’s just never quite lived up to series 1 and 2. It’s felt a bit like one of those BBC3 drama pilots a few months back which were oh so desperate to be like Skins! I strongly suspect that – taken in isolation – I would have found the series pretty entertaining, however it never quite captivated me in the same way as the “original” skins. I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why, which has frustrated me intensely. The new series had a whole new cast, and I’ve thought that the difference between Cook and Tony (from series 3 and 1/2 respectively) was probably quite indicative of the more general differences between the series. But just what was that difference? Now series 3 has finished, I’ve just gone back and watched the first episode of series 1 to see if I could work it out.
Well, today is my last official day working on BBC HD audio. Somehow I don’t think this project will leave me alone just yet, but after a week’s leave, my main focus will be elsewhere. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about something which has consumed a fair bit of my time, but which I haven’t blogged much about: metadata. For the uninitiated, metadata is “data about data”. A photo’s metadata for example might tell you what camera it was taken with, where it was taken, what exposure was used and so on. In the case of BBC HD’s audio, metadata is carried by the Dolby E and Dolby Digital streams we use, and has two main functions: it describes the audio being carried, and it controls the decoders in your homes. One parameter, often called dialnorm (for Dialogue Normalisation), tells your decoder how loud the programme is, so that it can attempt to smoothe out differences between programmes and channels to give you a more consistent loudness. Another set of parameters control what happens when your decoder downmixes the audio, meaning when it produces a stereo mix for your stereo speakers from the surround sound we may be sending. It’s important stuff, so we have to make sure that metadata survives our distribution chain, and sometimes we even have to add metadata to a programme automatically, which can be tricky. Here’s some of the work we’ve done…
