broadcast tape standards

[Bob Zelin]

Mark –
I like your “future insites”, but you obviously are not dealing with reality today, which is delivery to television networks, run by 60 year old men, that create stringent standards, and demand delivery on VTR’s that cost $100,000. These are not your clients, and you “dream on” about Blu Ray delivery, and future ftp sites, where “everyone” can do it. This is not today, and this is not even 5 years from now.

WHY ? Because people want to MAKE MONEY. And when you say “I have HDCam quality – HDCam is not enough. You need full 4:4:4 SRW HD. And when you make this happen, it will STILL not be good enough – you will need 2K (and 4K) (and 8K) delivery, and these products will cost more than you have to pay for them, and you will not be allowed to “play in the game”. And you will say “screw you – blu ray looks great, and this is what my friends want – screw broadcast – I’m going internet transmission with FIOS (for example).

In the mean time, in the REAL WORLD, WE want to make a living. Most stations STILL require Beta or Digi Beta Delivery, and the world is moving to TAPE BASED HD DELIVERY – weather that makes sense or not – the big players in LA DO NOT WANT A $1000 solution NO MATTER HOW GOOD IT IS. DO YOU UNDERSTAND that if the superior solution even costs $250,000,
THEY will pay it, just to keep you from “playing the game”, and getting contracts to post “Law and Order” and “CSI”. Why – becuase its BIG MONEY,and they want the money, and make sure that you dont’ get it. “But it looks just as good” you say – well, there is plenty of HDV, P2, etc. that looks fantastic, but if you READ the PBS and Discovery delivery documents, THEY DONT WANT IT no matter how good it looks (even if their internal producers are using it for their own production).

The process of learing the BROADCAST BUSINESS is learing how to play the game, and how to “get away” with using reasonable priced equipment, while delivering what “they want”- no matter how rediculous it seems.

This whole post thread started because someone wanted to know about Beta – BETA is still the #1 delivery format, even if Sony got rid of it.

Sense has nothing to do with what is happening in real life.

Bob Zelin

[Mark Suszko]

Bob, I have 22-plus years of broadcast TV experience, shooting, directing, editing, producing, and writing news, VNR’s, commercials and PSA’s as well as live and taped teleconferences. I don’t have anything Emmy-worthy IMO but have often placed tops in more local broadcast spot competitions, back when I entered them. My little podunk shop is not even a blip to LA or New York, but we regularly feed live satellite interviews from our studios to the Sunday morning talk shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox and MSNBC, among others. Last week I sent off archival footage to Nightline (they requested BetacamSp though I could have sent them dcvpro25 or mpeg 2 on DVD) and to two other national shows produced out of New York and Chicago. They all still wanted betaSP too.

That’s all just by way of introduction, so you know that you don’t have to teach me how to suck eggs, as the old expression goes. I cut my teeth editing EIAJ reel to reel, machine to machine, with just a grease pencil, a stopwatch and a pot of coffee, I remember quad tape, and I now cut on Discreet and FCP. I think I still remember how to do a flange-back adjustment. My first camera used for work was so old it had tail fins (okay a heat sink, those TK’s ran very hot, but still it was OLD. So old the serial number was in Roman Numerals) I used to hand-hold “Handy-Looky” 79’s with no shoulder pad, the weight offset by a bandolier of lead-acid cells and a portable umatic deck on shoulder strap… and I knew how to adjust a Conrac so the bars looked right, without using a scope…(though I DO know how to read a scope and WFM). This week I’m authoring interactive DVD’s, building Lightwave animated virtual sets, and testing codecs for web videos.

And I feel I am just beginning to learn this business.

I don’t pretend to be smarter or more experienced than anyone else here, but I kind of took a slight offense at your all-caps castigation and verbal beat-down, which is how you came off just now. Some people come off crustier in text than they do in real life, and I want you to know I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here. But maybe you might want to widen your perspective a wee bit, now that I’ve presented my meager bona-fides as prelude to my opinions.

With half of my clients over the years being broadcast stations and cable company head-ends, I spent last summer polling my customers on their formats. They are all now accepting SD DVD’s instead of tape, that only took three years since the previous survey results, and I’m down to making maybe three beta dubs per run of 50 spots. I made my last Type C 0ne-Inch spot reel dub sometime early last year.

Where I agree with you and the general consensus is, station management is first off about the dollar, all tech and operational decisions flow from that. If they could put a wheeled dolly on our one-inch I’m sure they’d sent it out as a field recorder, just because it’s already paid for.:-)

Where I don’t perfectly align with your perspective is in the area of what you’re describing as management’s deliberate creating of tech and economic barriers to entry from us “low-level” bottom-feeders. I think this case may be overstated. I don’t know what Discovery Channel QC Engineer ran over your dog, but you should lighten up a little bit.

I also wanted to point out you kind of oversimplified your version of my argument regarding adopting BluRay decks over HD tape decks. I didn’t imply or declare they were or would be the only way to go, at every level. I did say that they would make a lot of sense for prosumer and small-market broadcast and industrial/government/corporate. Because it works for those “lower levels” as well as consumers, using essentially the exact same platform, this has great potential to be adopted by default as an interchange/archival/physical distribution method that works at every level of the chain. Even by “high end” broadcast.

I predict news and commercial spots will be where this format makes the first broadcast inroads, due to economy. What Discovery and PBS eventually decide, I couldn’t say. Except to point out that much of what Discovery and PBS shows can carry footage from cruddy old newsreels, kinescopes, and home movies, all bumped-up to a new final format. So content still allows us to forgive the format it comes on.

And as far as commercials, well, show me a single station manager that would tell an advertiser: “Oh, no, we can’t Possibly take your ad buy money, your HD content commercials are on bluray and we only take tape, please take your business to the other channel across town or come back when you have it on HD tape.” You can’t and you know it. Just a way to say not all format decisions are technology based or standards-derived.

And that’s about all I wanted to say about that.

Be well.

[Mike Healey]

I’ve been doing a lot of national fulfillment work tagging spots and shipping them off to networks. The source material is coming as MOV files on DVD and spot delivery is BetaSP.

Recently, I’ve had two co-op management firms do away with sending out spots on Beta for their local stores to have tagged. They are uploading MOV files to an FTP server and we have to go fetch them. It’s a pain in the butt having to download these 800MB MOV files and have edit* import them… but the quality is superior to Beta IMO. Not to mention no more tape sitting on the shelf or waiting for an overnight deilvery. I’m already seeing a major shift in the way spots are distributed.

We still distribute spots on BetaSP as well as DVCPro and MiniDV for smaller markets. And yes, we’re starting to get more requests to FTP spots directly to stations and movie theaters.

With all this data up and down I think maybe it’s time for me to rethink broadband and nail down something faster! LOL!

~Mike~

Mike Healey Productions, Inc.
Media Production | Logistics | Fulfillment
http://www.MikeHealeyProductions.com

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Mark –
replies below as necessary –

I used to hand-hold “Handy-Looky” 79’s with no shoulder pad

REPLY – top credibility right there, just for knowing this name !

But maybe you might want to widen your perspective a wee bit, now that I’ve presented my meager bona-fides as prelude to my opinions.

REPLY – Mark, I know very well that Beta (and Digi Beta) is still the #1 requested delivery format, and I was the first person to ever get AVID “online” (AVR26 and AVR27) on the air in NY at VH-1, and “fooled” HBO NY into accepting D2 on line masters when they were AVID masters dubbed composite onto a D2 rental VTR (Hi Reynold Rossi !). I am trying to stress the insanity of our business, and how one must learn to deal with the ever changing “delivery requirements” that become more and more stringent year after year. No matter what I tell my clients to get, it’s never enough, there is always “the better, more expensive machine” that is required. I am just trying to force my stress upon this group (if I have to suffer, you have to suffer too).

Where I don’t perfectly align with your perspective is in the area of what you’re describing as management’s deliberate creating of tech and economic barriers to entry from us “low-level” bottom-feeders. I think this case may be overstated. I don’t know what Discovery Channel QC Engineer ran over your dog, but you should lighten up a little bit.

REPLY – I don’t know how you can say this, if you have had to deal with “out of town” delivery requirements. Didn’t you ever have tapes rejected because you didn’t have access to a Dolby LM-100 meter, even thought your audio is 100% perfectly fine ? Didn’t you ever have a producer “shudder in fear” because you weren’t working at full 4:4:4, even though you know that you could deliver a Beta, with no fear of rejection ? I can’t believe that you have been doing this for so long, and have never had tapes rejected for assorted technical reasons. Back before AVID, and todays standards, it was COMMON PRACTICE for larger houses and networks to reject linear masters (from 1″, etc) for wide blanking, SCH errors, etc. And you would stand there, in front of a scope, looking for that ONE SCENE that was at 11.4 uSec, when everything else was at 10.8uSec – and you wind up saying WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE LOOKING AT THESE TAPES !!!!

I also wanted to point out you kind of oversimplified your version of my argument regarding adopting BluRay decks over HD tape decks. I didn’t imply or declare they were or would be the only way to go, at every level. I did say that they would make a lot of sense for prosumer and small-market broadcast and industrial/government/corporate. Because it works for those “lower levels” as well as consumers, using essentially the exact same platform, this has great potential to be adopted by default as an interchange/archival/physical distribution method that works at every level of the chain. Even by “high end” broadcast.

REPLY – I don’t disagree here at all. Mastering to Blu Ray is in the official Panasonic document on P2 workflow. Look Mark, most people are nice people, and most stations accept whatever you send them. I have been dealing with assorted stations (both cable and network) for many years, and most people are nice EVEN WHEN THERE ARE PROBLEMS. But there is this “crazy zone” (think WGBH Boston) that will torture you. And it is these few locations that make life miserable for everyone, because NOTHING is good enough. There are tons of HDW-F500’s and HDW-M2000’s in LA, but recently, many feel that you MUST master with a SRW-5500, or it’s simply “not good enough” – WHY MARK – what do you do with these people ?

This started off as a simple post – “what should I deliver”, and I tried to turn it into this insane rant, because in my opinion, it was more important to discuss the tyrany of the few, rather than the correct answer, which (as you stated) was “deliver a Beta VTR, and you will be fine”.

Bob Zelin