Dan Merker, who incidentally has a brilliant solution to the gridlock between exponents and opponents of a college football playoff, was appalled to see his high-definition picture of the World Series Game 1 squeezed to standard-def when an Amber Alert went out for 16-year-old Makenzie Green of Grain Valley.
"Really?" Dan writes. "Channel 4 STILL can't overlay a crawl over HD? It's almost 2010..." Yes, says Fox 4's news director Bryan McGruder, and when 2010 comes, the station will be able to overlay a crawl over HD.
"We just upgraded the switcher this week so that it will accept a piece of equipment we'll install in the coming weeks that will allow us to overlay on top of the HD programming while maintaining HD integrity," according to McGruder.
That means Fox 4 news will air in HD as well? UPDATE: Not so fast. After this post originally appeared, McGruder wrote back: "Our news will continue to air in SD, even after the switcher upgrade. The switcher to which I'm referring is the on-air switcher(master control). We use another switcher to produce the newscasts(production control) and it remains SD as will our newscasts."
Personally, I don't mind having the picture revert to SD during emergencies. It gets your attention.
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