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Videotape lives???
This has me scratching my head. We just had to send a couple of commercial spots to ESPN. They requested tape. TAPE!!
Exact verbage from the ESPN sales rep:
“Commercial spots should be for standard format tape Digi or Beta SP,
for HD format DVC Pro or D5 tape slated with client name, length, and ISCI code.”I was pretty dumbfounded. I haven’t made a tape dub in probably three years or more. We still have racks of decks, but I couldn’t even tell you the last time any of them were even turned on.
Fortunately I was able to send them files like we do with any other broadcaster, but the rep didn’t know of any FTP protocol set up there for delivery… I had to put them on our server and send her a download link. Even with a file they still wanted a countdown and slate on it. Every other outlet we have ever sent to requires a :30 spot to be exactly 900 frames…no more, no less. I guess things are different in Bristol.
I was surprised that anyone, especially a (cable) network, wanted tape for a national spot.
Anyone else seen this??
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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7 Replies
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Totally…all the time. I’ve delivered shows to MSNBC, PBS, NatGeo, History Channel, all national networks…all still require tape. HDCAM or HDCAM SR. Most of my deliverables are tape…tapeless is rare. Oh, and one network, Discovery, is asking for tapeless delivery ON TAPE! LTO6….
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I’m not at all surprised that tape delivery still exists for shows… but I thought it was a thing of the past for spots.
Guess I live in a cave. Maybe it’s a cable network thing?… I’ll admit that’s the first time I’ve delivered commercials to a cable network since, oh, the good ol’ BetaSP days when dinosaurs roamed free.
I’m sure it will eventually disappear but apparently still lives on.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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With Extreme Reach you send them one file and they get the spot to the station regardless of where they are located.
Only Charter here wants the exact 900 frames….all other stations require a 5 second slate, 2 black, spot then at least one full frame of black at the end, most will take 2 seconds at the end.
They run them thru the FlipFactory and extract and encode the spot to their server settings.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com -
[Rich Rubasch] “spot then at least one full frame of black at the end”
No half frames?
🙂
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Not only do they still occasionally ask for barbaric tape formats like betaSP, or DVCPro ( THAT, we can do!) … they ask for ISCI codes, which technically went defunct like, a decade ago…? I guess people just make them up randomly out of thin air now. ISCI was superseded by another coding scheme some time ago, but people still call it ISCI, like old timers call any character generated type a “Chyron”, …maybe.
HDCam SR decks are freaking EXPENSIVE to own, even today. We never did get one. And in a time when we have hard disks and flash-based solid state media, it makes no sense to me… I will bet the reason for it has mostly to do with the guys wearing the white shoes and belts in Accounting, rather than any real technical reason.
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Well, ISCI codes still indeed live, and if a broadcaster requires one you have to get it assigned by Ad-ID… for which they are happy to take your FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS to assign a spot or campaign a prefix (and another $40 for the remaining four digits). A complete racket.
As for farming out delivery, honestly it’s been years since I’ve used a service…. DGFastchannel or Extreme Reach or anything like that. It would make perfect sense if I were sending spots to hundreds of outlets, but most of our stuff is local or regional and it never goes to more than a few places… a dozen (maybe two) at best. They also usually go to the same places, and we have a master upload bible of who gets what, and all their FTP info is saved in the Filezilla site manager so it’s usually pretty much a one-click upload.
A sales rep from one of the uploaders (don’t remember which) called a while back and was giving me the hard sell. Even after knowing our volume, what goes where, and all that jazz… he still couldn’t understand why I wasn’t using them. I told him, “I can either upload spots to you, and then pay you for that… or I can upload spots directly to broadcasters, a service for which we charge our clients. I can either upload and spend money, or upload and make money.” He conceded in our situation he’d be doing the same thing. As I said, would be different if we had hundreds of uploads, but it’s usually no more than a few a day at most.
I did just now double check our upload bible and glanced through all the specs for the big list of broadcasters and cable outlets we serve… not a single one of them required slates, black, or countdowns, and many expressly forbid them. I know in the past a couple of times our spots have been kicked back with a re-upload request because they were accidently 901 frames.
I suppose your mileage may vary.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I freelance for ESPN on trucks doing sports. It is getting rarer but many times we do take tape for elements for the show like lower thirds and player names. Yes the producer still hauls around a big box of tape and all trucks still drag one VTR around the country just in case.
That being said it has probably been five years since we ran a money (commercial) reel out of a truck even for the smallest networks. That all is done in master control now.
You are dealing with a large corporation, but maybe Bristol likes the degeneration caused by video tape. It does take a long time to change the corse of a large ship especially when there are multiple captains involved and the higher the captain, the more they are removed from the reality of day to day operations.
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