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introduction to “broadcast quality” ?
Hi,
Im fairly new to after effects and have been landed with producing an advert for TV. This is a different ballgame from just rendering out to mpegs or whatever.
What other factors do I have to take into consideration?
Is an output from AE going to be good enough for TV (pal)?It looks like its going to be a 3d scene in AE made up of stills, but with bits of live action thrown in as well.
Any tips would be greatly received!
Cheers
Neil -
9 Replies
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You must talk to the person who will be receiving your piece. Usually it’s an editor who will lay off your digital files to tape. Find out exactly what they want from you in terms of codec, frame size, file type, delivery medium, levels.
The levels thing is important. In NTSC-land, normally you’d run the levels effect in an adjustment layer to change your blacks to 16 and whites to 235, though it’s often preferable to choose 16 blacks and 235 whites as your elements if the rest of your material (say, footage) is already safe. This means you don’t dull down your footage by running levels on it. Ideally, you’d have a scope downstream of your graphics to test whether the levels (and saturation) is safe.
Speaking of saturation, one way to keep that safe is to use the “key out unsafe” broadcast safe effect after the levels effect and hue/sat effect in the effect stack. This tells you when colours are safe or not. You can make the hue/sat effect pick certain colours to desaturate. Red is often problematic. As for yellow, it’s best to tweak it a bit towards orange to make it safe, rather than knocking down its saturation towards yucky green.
You also need to make sure your important images are within the action safe area, and your titles are within title safe area. TVs cut off the image around the edges, unlike computer monitors.
For more details, pick up the Creating Motion Graphics books by Chris and Trish Meyer.
That’s my 2 cents. Anybody else?
Steve 🙂
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hi, thanks for the reply. I think i have the book you mentioned somewhere. Will dig it out and have a look.
Anyone else got anything to add?
Cheers
Neil -
For broadcast, in a nutshell: You don’t want to use pure black or pure white. You also don’t want to have sharp transitions from black to white, such as sharp white text on black background. Don’t oversaturate your colors, either…heavily saturated colors will bleed. High levels of luminance or chrominance can cause buzzing in the audio of an NTSC signal, I’m not sure if PAL is the same way. And hard edges, especially horizontal ones, are prone to jitter. Same with thin horizontal lines.
That’s what I can remember at the moment.
Cf
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Your best bet is to listen to steve and get a waveform/vectorscope.
Also, use colour bars, and set your levels to match the colour bars.
ie. The brightest part of your images shouldn’t go any higher than the brightest point of the colour bars. Same with the blacks.
As long as you stay within those ranges there shouldn’t be any issues.
The correct level for black in digital is 0 IRE (If you want to be ultra conservative you could set your blacks to 7.5 IRE analog). White is 100 IRE.
As long as your footage is setup the same as your bars, no engineer can say boo.
Just to let you know I am a broadcast technician, so I know a little about what I am talking about.
Ryan
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Oh I am not an engineer, I am a technician. Engineer’s maintain the equipment. I run the equipment and calibrate the equipment. I guess in some circles that could be the same.
I understand where you come from though. Some engineers can be a major pain in the ***.
I actually am in Canada. We spell colour <--- this way. I work for the CBC as an editor/technician. As an editor I make the content, and as a technician I line up and air the content. At home on both sides of the coin. Ryan
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It should be noted Neil, that fine professionals (and excellent spellers!) like Ryan are probably in a position to toss your tape back to you if it doesn’t meet broadcast spec.
Or at best, the editor who receives your stuff might have to mess with your colours so that the tape doesn’t get thrown back at him.
(Not that we have any illusions about NTSC fidelity anyway, but we designers try to do our best.)
Steve 🙂
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A video scope is your best start to achieving “Broadcast Quality” standards.
Other factors such as geration loss, and overall video production quality come into play in the “Broadcast Quality” equasion.
Check out this site for details on what your PAL levels should be.https://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/0E5DAD8917692B5D86256F3500549509
DJ
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Why Steve, you have made me blush.
Ryan
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You guys are talking about buying a software vectorscope. After Effects 6.5 comes with Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse, which retails for around $500 and is a software waveform/vectorscope. Look on your installation CD for After Effects 6.5.
Steven
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