• Creative Community Conversations

  Tv Ads

  Posted by Tom Raymond on June 27, 2013 at 3:29 pm

  I’ve completed a generic commercial for dentists. It’s watermarked, color corrected, broadcast safe, and ready for “tagging”, so I’m itching to start pitching it to prospective customers.
  Two big questions: Formatting and formats for local cable insertion- there seems to be no concise standard. I have 00:30 of color bars and tone, a 00:30 slate, 00:05 of black, the 00:30 ad, and 00:05 of black. I know this will probably be adjusted for each submission. Now it’s to tape I guess…Beta? DV?
  Also, I’m unknowledgeable about media buyers and airtime. Internet inquiries reveal wildly different and complicated scenarios. I’d love to delegate this aspect of my Detroit area based proto-business, if that’s even possible, or could a media buyer or cable ad sales rep help me acquire customers? How does this work?
  I know I’m asking for a ton of information: I’d really just appreciate any good advice that anyone has the time to post.

  Thank you,
  Tom Raymond
  wishooktv@gmail.com

  Tom Raymond replied 13 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Mark Suszko

  June 27, 2013 at 4:46 pm

  Go take a look at the web site for DG Systems. In a simplified description how they work is: Send one file there, let them worry about reformatting and delivering it to the list of selected stations. It’s all FTP, and they can make tape dubs for the ones that still need that as well. They aren’t the only ones that do this, but they are popular.

  If your scope is much smaller, or infrequent, you could just set up an FTP of your own.

  The days of leaders, slates and countdowns are just about gone, I think: typically now we’re told just have one clean frame of black at the front of the file, and a five-second pad of it at the end. All the gak we used to put on the front of tape dubs is now handled in metadata tags.

  I DO NOT miss the long, tedious, repetitive task of tape duplication runs.
  Now if we could just standardize on one file type spec for all http://FTP…...
• 

  Tom Raymond

  June 28, 2013 at 6:56 am

  After a brief initial perusal of the DG Systems site, I can tell that you have just saved me months of headaches and wasted time. Thank you very much indeed for introducing me to FTP and helping me into the current century.
  Best,
  Tom Raymond
  wishooktv@gmail.com

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up