broadcast tape standards

[Bob Zelin]

this is the answer to your question. You find what delivery format is required by the broadcaster you are delivering to, and buy (or rent) that VTR format. Why would you purchase a DVCPro VTR when the broadcaster will only accept a Digi Beta VTR. There are countless formats that are required by different TV stations – no one owns them all.

Bob Zelin

[Devin Crane]

Although i have talked to only 1 person that didn’t accept Beta SP and they are in the Cayman Islands. Of course you cannot purchase a Beta Sp deck new anymore, go figure. The day everyone has an HDCam Deck Sony will stop making it.

I will dance with joy once we send out our last Beta Tape

[Tom Matthies]

In my neck of the woods up here, Beta SP is still the preferred delivery format for commercial content in SD. It’s the closest thing to a universal format in this market. Everyone can tale a Beta tape.
Tom

[Bob Zelin]

“everyone” used to be able to take a 1″ VTR tape, because everyone owned 1″ VTR’s. Every ad agency in the US owned only 3/4″ VTR’s, long after other formats, including DVD were readily available. Gee – what happened to “universal” standard formats. Everyone of my clients owns at least one Beta VTR, but I can assure you that in 5 years, you won’t even see Beta VTR’s at any facility. So, what’s the next “universal” format – if you know the answer to this question, you should buy a lottery ticket, because you are a lucky guy in the know.

Bob Zelin

[Del Holford]

Just to stir the pot a little, South Carolina ETV still has at least one and possibly two of every format for broadcast. I’m not sure the VO-2850 would be considered broadcast but we have a working BVU-800 in our racks (VT13). SCETV still has working quad machines! They occasionally make dubs for us (just across the line in NC) and I’ve put other PBS members on to them. The reason they have the machines is because the state legislature requires they be able to play everything in their archive library, and that goes back a ways. It’s been rumored they’ve had to machine some of their own replacement parts.

On the delivery side, I think full resolution Quick Time movies (like a 720×486 pixel commercial) are beginning to make an entry. As the technology continues to improve digital delivery on DVD-ROM or perhaps BluRay ROM or whatever improves those technologies will be one option for deliverables. I pulled a 720×486 QT off a website per their instructions and I was able to import that into smoke and finish a promo/spot for air from that. Looked a lot better than BetaSP, although I’m sure SCETV will keep one of those for years to come as well.
🙂

Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS3
Charlotte Public Television
del underscore edits at wtvi dot org

[Bob Zelin]

DEL,
I want you shot and hung up as an example. How DARE you tell other PBS people that you still use Quad and 3/4″ format ! Didn’t you see “the gospel according to PBS”, which is more important than God’s own words, and makes mere independent producers shake in their boots ! Hey, I don’t make this crap up, it’s insane nuts at PBS and Discovery that come up with this crap, and then YOU come and confuse the hell out of us down here on earth with your nonsense reply. Someone is wrong, and SOMEONE must die ! Now Del, you and your boss, read this document, and you report back to the group.

SEE BELOW (so keep reading this post below )-
Bob Zelin

Dt: 9/13/07
To: PBS Producers
Fr: David Field, Director, PBS Program Packaging
Re: 2007 Technical Operating Specifications (TOS)

The newest version of the PBS Technical Operating Specifications (TOS)
is now available for download at
https://www.pbs.org/producers/redbook/. The TOS outlines the technical
guidelines for all PBS program submissions. Although these new
guidelines were effective September 1, 2007, PBS will offer a 120-day
grace period for producers who need extra time to adjust budgets and
workflows. Programs submitted after January 1, 2008, will be expected
to meet the new specifications.

Notable changes made in 2005 and continued in 2007 include:

• Elimination of VTR format types C, D2, D3, D5, SP, 3/4″ &
HD-D5
• Elimination of SMPTE stereo leader
• Elimination of Actimates signal insertion
• Relaxation of vertical blanking to 480 lines (consistent
with DV and MPEG-2)
• Addition of HDCam
• Addition of language addressing lip-sync and dialog/music
ratio audio issues
• Phased expansion of audio dynamic range and requirement for
dialnorm measurement
• Emphasized requirement for audio channel 4
• An accompanying recommended practice with tips to help
producers remain in compliance with the specifications

Additional changes made in 2007 include:

• Dialog level change to -24 dBFS ±2 dB from -27 dBFS ±2 dB
• Dialnorm value changes from -27 to -24 for HD and from -27
to -31 for SD
• Expanded description of requirements for audio levels
• Change in VITC location
• Clarification of lip sync limits
• Updated Technical Evaluation form
• Changed “RGB” and “Red, Green, Blue” to “GBR” and “Green,
Blue, Red” to reflect current industry practice and style; because GBR
more closely follows the component designations of Y, Pb, Pr and Y,
Cb, Cr. This change does not affect performance

[Del Holford]

I edited “Ralna English: From My Heart” for PBS distribution (in a mere 70 hours one week). Ralna is a wonderful person and her producer was also great – organized and knew what she wanted. The folks in Arlington are enough to drive anyone crazy. They make cottage industries out of former PBS engineers starting their own companies to do tech evaluations for PBS. If anyone can decipher whatever it is they’re saying in the Red Book and technical spec documents this week give me a call. Oh, forget that, it will change next week. And DIALNORM. Digital audio is supposed to go from -96 to 0 (nominally at 48K/24bit). So what’s with tone at -20 and DIALNORM at -24 for HD? Give me a break! And why didn’t they eliminate D1 from their acceptable list of VTRs?

I feel your pain Bob and I can’t answer for those with superior intellect in Arlington. I just make sure my signals for SD are what I learned when I was operating the TR-70C: that cameras match, that black levels aren’t crushed and white levels are hard clipped at 105. The color correctors built into smoke and fire are awesome and we actually use the waveform monitors in the edit suites.

We at Charlotte Public Television (the town that brought you UNC’s win to put them in the final four and neighbor to Davidson in the north county) have a good relationship with the folks in Columbia, SC, so we do ask the occasional favor and I got to finish/conform a beautiful HD program on “Mansions and Chapels of the Low Country” in exchange for their signal strength van to do field measurements for our HD signal. Just because we’re PBS members doesn’t mean we understand all the edicts coming down from on high (Arlington being slightly more elevated than the swamps of DC). I mean plain old HD Cam for delivery rather than D5 HD?

On the other hand, if you find yourself with a reel of 2″ quad tape and need a place to play it, the fine folks at SCETV in Columbia, SC can play it for you. The folks at Charlotte’s CBS affiliate, WBTV, have used our BVU to dub news archives to DVC Pro, so if you need help playing an old 3/4″ tape we’ll help you. Maybe even Bob. :-}

Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS3
Charlotte Public Television
del underscore edits at wtvi dot org

[Tom Matthies]

Yea, I have a couple of Quad machines in storage yet, a pair of Ampex VPR250 D2’s in the shop, a working BVU-950 in the rack, a single Sony 3100 is there too. Haven’t needed to turn them on for a while but who knows??
Ah, but you still can’t beat the sound of a Quad machine put into the play mode and the vacuum guides pull in and you get that sweet CLICK-WHINEZZZZZZ sound. Good times, good times.
You pups don’t know what you’re missing. We’re so spoiled now…
Tom

[Bob Zelin]

If you come from Quad, having a BVU-200 3/4″ VTR meant you were SPOILED ! With today’s P2 flash disks, and media on drives – eeh – these damn kids are ALL spoiled. I think the specs (like PBS Red Book) are made to torture young people that never had to sweat.

Bob Zelin

ps – the Discovery specs are worse.

[Mark Suszko]

PBS standards are legendary for strictness. I would say they make a great standard to shoot for in general, but the interpretation of some of those standards has at times been a point of friction.

As to what a future standard format might look like, I don’t think there will be one any more for aquisition. But for physical media distribution and a shelvable archive, I have high hopes for BluRay now that the wars are over. My logic runs like this:

The members of the Bluray consortium are even now beginning to flood the market with drives and (relatively cheap) stand-alone players and by next year, recorders as well. The Bluray media is already comparable in price to tape formats we’re familiar with, and supplier competition to dominate the market is going to put pressure on those prices to drop further. Already any kind of DVD is way cheaper to store and to mail than a tape cassette like a betaSP or digital betacam, etc. If I’m one of the guys with the green eyeshades and you show me an HD tape deck that’s $25k and a BluRay deck that’s under $1k, and you tell me they both put out essentially the same HD picture, what do you think the purchase decision is going to be? BluRay dubber robots are already in the field and only cost three grand for a Bravo primera version that can kick out a hundred dubs in one or two hours, unattended. This is a very powerful concept. What I’m anxiously awating is for Apple to get it together and offer Bluray on FCP and burner drives for the mac, to catch up with Adobe. They just have to, or they are going to get left behind. I expect, no, I COUNT on an announcement by macworld or next NAB.

The result of this massive Blue invasion is, we’ll have a base of compatible players out there in industry and the consumer’s home and schools and festivals that can play one common HD format, from bedrooms to boardrooms to breakrooms to broadcast ops rooms. Alternatives like shipping removeable/returnable raid drive modules are non-starters, like old fashioned returnable glass milk bottle delivery, compared to the ultimate familiarity and simplicity of: “Put disk in slot, play video, put on shelf to store”. No petabyte raids or sans to feed and tweak. Unless you WANT to feed it into one, of course, then keep the hard copy offsite as backup.

Virtual FTP type delivery is of course an even better deal, and a major wave of the future, IMO, but there will always be cases, particularly in smaller markets, prosumer, indie and industrial, where you need at some point to have the HD program in your hands in a self-archiving, self-shipping format. Blueray durability has been proven with very dramatic demos, (including a belt sander I’m told) we won’t know about longevity for a while yet, but I don’t think lasting ten years is too wild a bet to make.

By then perhaps a holographic format will have taken over, or quantum foam, or something equally exotic, I can’t know. It could be as some producer/directors have claimed, that BluRay is the last physical format we’ll see and everything will be virtual in the future. But old fashioned paper books and safety film stock are still with us, and will be for some time yet. Umatic was born about the same time as Sgt. Pepper was released, and some of those decks are still working today. We have one such old soldier creakily cranking out old archival footage from the 80’s and 90’s that we’re dubbing over to SD DVD-R’s right now. When those umatic tapes are all converted and shredded, we’ll start on the one-inch reels. May take a year or two, we had a lot of tape. The nice thing is that as things get “flattened” to disk, we recover massive amounts of reclaimed shelf space in the library so we can hold more in less volume.

I don’t pick Bluray for any reason except that the combination of an affordable home-user base of stand-alone players, as well as affordable updated drives for home and office computers, makes the potential number of playable places so large, it has the best chance of becoming the next “betaSP” of interchange and archival until those other brave new formats come and upset the applecart again. By which time I will be safely retired, I hope:-) Seriously though; on a cost basis, on a basis of widest possible compatibility both in consumer and industrial spheres, I dont see what else looks as good as BluRay right now. I don’t say you need to shoot on it, but when you have to deliver on a hardware format, this looks very good to me as an HD “standard you can store”, without anything more complicated than a shelf and a sharpie.