Codec question

[Bob Grow]

> My advice: contact the company that’s going to distribute the spot for you. Simply explain your situation, without making any apologies. Explanations, perhaps; apologies, no. I think you’ll find they’ll be quite respectful and helpful.

What I’m dealing with here is layers of bureaucracy consisting of sales people who want to control the flow of information yet know nothing technically. They won’t allow me to call anyone at the agency because they think they’ll look stupid.

One of the formats they’re posting to our site is 720×405 using the Apple Animation format. What broadcast formats support this resolution? None of the standard ones as far as I can tell.

Like I said earlier, the production facility is handing the uncompressed files off to a third party to be exported out of QuickTime. Something doesn’t smell right, but I don’t know exactly what to say to my manager.

Some please give me some ammo here…

Thanks!

[Gary Hazen]

“What’s the standard codec for digital distribution?”
I think it would help if you defined “digital distribution”.
Are you delivering a file that will be played back on the web?
Are you delivering a file that will be downloaded and ingested into a system for additional editing or used in a playout server?

For spot delivery to broadcast outlets I think Telestream and DG systems use I-frame MPEG-2 compression to send files over IP. I don’t know the specifics of the data rate, etc.

Again I’m not really sure what you mean by “digital distribution”.
And 720 x 405 is not a broadcast size. If you have a 720 x 486 FHA (full height anamorphic) video you can scale it to 720 x 405 for web use. I suppose you could bring the 720 x 405 file into AE and output a letterboxed 4:3 file (720 x 486).