Broadcast Delivery File Spec Help!

[Shane Ross]

“Video Levels – “Must comply with ITU 709. Luminance (Y) must
not exceed 714mv (100 IRE units) & Chrominance levels in the Y/Pr/Pb
domain must not exceed 785mv (110 IRE units).” How do I check if my edit complies with these, and if it doesn’t, make it do so?”

You need video scopes to check this. There is a line at the top that is the ceiling of 100 IRE…lots of lines in the middle…and then the floor of 0 IRE. You need to make sure your video doesn’t stray outside of that. Some broadcast monitors have scopes built in, and you feed that a video signal from a capture card or device. There are external devices that have scopes, but they are spendy. And a few apps have internal scopes, like Resolve. And software solutions like SCOPEBOX.

You can also try to use the BROADCAST SAFE plugin that Premiere has. That’s supposed to crush things on both ends to meet that spec, but sometimes it doesn’t get it quite all the way, and some things can hit 101 or 102 IRE. But that might be an option…if you don’t have the money nor expertise to invest into and install external options.

“Timecode – “Timecode must be present in QuickTime .MOV as a timecode track“. Is this just clicking the ‘Set Start Timecode’ setting when exporting, or something different?”

This would mean exporting a file type that supports embedded timecode. So ProRes would support this, and DNxHD. And the timecode would be what your sequence timecode is. If it starts at 1:00:00:00…then it will embed it into the export starting at that number. DO you know if they need drop-frame or non-drop frame timecode?