Damn, well I'll take that one on the chin. The main reason I figured they weren't shooting HD is that it's a big expense, and MTV is pretty chintzy...having worked for them a few times, there's no end to the corner-cutting there.

OK, I just called up a colleague who did Steadicam on the event to clarify the whole thing. Apparently they did use the 24P HD cameras to generate the 24 frame look, and the original plan was to record to HD, but in the end they just recorded out to NTSC. However, there may still have been some Filmlook processing going on in terms of the gamma etc. as I described earlier, the guy I talked to wasn't sure but he suspected as much.

Your making me a bit jaleous Charles... I wish I could rang
someone up who worked for such a thing. Oh well. Anyways
thanks for checking! Appreciated.

Here' something I pulled off 2-pop

----OK. Here's a little info on the MTV Awards broadcast. I'll only repeat what I know to be true and leave any speculation to others.

The broadcast truck was from All Mobile Video and the cameras were the Sony 900 series Hi Def broadcast cameras, which output 1080i and have variable frame rate capability. The show used 24 frame for capture, and the frame rate is converted to normal 60i using 3:2 pulldown at the camera CCU (camera control unit) which is in the truck. That is also where the conversion from the Hi Def output of the camera is down converted to normal 601 broadcast video.

All this happens in real time, so the show could be broadcast in real time but was probably delayed to blip any obscenities. But technically, it could have been broadcast live-live. --- waynor