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commercials specifications
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I agree jamie….
but i imagine that whoever your employer has a contract with to deliver the commercial, they will provide you with tech guidlines as per the contract. They must do otherwise there is nothing to stop you delivering the commercial on a vhs! Ask them for that bit of paper and i bet it will give you the delivery spec. Same with any broadcast item.
Cheers
Nick -
Haha! Good point…. maybe I should see if I can get away with a VHS that I’ve been using for recording the last 3 episodes of ‘Lost’ lol
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Woah! Calm, calm, Matte…
After 10 years of working with edit suites, I had discovered that you can have different lengths of dissolves….
Jeez, bet you’re a barrel of laughs in the suite on a long session 🙂
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Excellent! Thanks for that Martin.
Do I remember that Digital Heaven have a plugin for setting the text at a legal size for ads? Or am I making that up?
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[JamieWorsfold]
After 10 years of working with edit suites, I had discovered that you can have different lengths of dissolves….
I’m not telling you about HOW to dissolve, I’m saying that the “fade-to-black” I use in spots is not “slow” and time-consuming… its a fast lap.
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No I don’t. I used to out of habit until a client pointed out the same thing. Just now I turned on the TV and watched a bunch of commercials. I’d say 75% didn’t fade on either end. A few national commercials faded up VERY quickly (3-4 frames) probably just to keep older TVs from going haywire, but none faded out, and the only commercials that faded up and then also out were local lawer ads and that sort of thing.
Most TV promos and station IDs faded up and down.
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I’ve been doing spot production for more years than I care to talk about and I must say that the “standards” have changed a bit over the years.
Not many years ago, in the Chicago market, the BIG agencys had a very definite standard for their spots. 15 frame fade in/fade out. Bars/tone a slate and an academy leader complete with a 2-pop and then 1:28 of black before the spot started. We even put noise test standards as well as channel and phase information on the tone under the bars. all in all a very specific standard that was used ALWAYS-no exceptions. These were all national quality spots-not the local stuff.
These days, with the advent of digital servers, it seems that just about anything goes. I see about an even amount of spots that fade up from black and those that cut in and out. With the digital servers that most spots are play from, it’s very easy to set the in and out point that the spots will start at with an accuracy of +/- one frame. This simply wasn’t possible in the past with tape based spot players, hence the fade in/out pad on the spots. While many “cart” type players were very accurate at cueing up the tapes, they still relied on an operator to set those cues while dubbing the spots onto the carts.
These days (and here comes the “old” guy lament portion of the show) it seems that just about anything goes. Local spots are the worst by far. I can’t believe the garbage that I see in the air these days. Truely bad. Even on the national level, things are a lot looser than in the past. There is something to be said for us a “classic” editors that grew up in this business actually setting levels and standards for spots. As much as I hate to actually say this, many in our business have no idea of how to produce a spot with “correct” standards. Many have no idea how to read a waveform monitor or a vector scope. I would guess that many production facilities (of the smaller variety) don’t even own a scope. The built-in software based scopes are useful, but you still can’t beat looking at a good old fashioned CRT based instrument. Or at least a rasterizer-type scope. Hell, anything would be an improvement over guessing levels by how they look on an uncalibrated monitor.
Even though the “standards” vary, my usual commercial spot arrangement is 30 sec. bars/tone, 5 sec slate, 5 sec. academy leader with a 2-pop followed by black until the start of the spot. I still use a fade up from black although the duration can vary. Depending on the content of the spot, I have used a cut in/out format as well. It just depends. Finally, I put at least 10 seconds of black on the tail.
It depends, to a large degree still, on the operator at the station to correctly place the cues on the digital files in the correct places. This will tell the computer just where to start the spot and just where to end it and switch to the next file in the sequence. Humans are still involved. Humans can still make mistakes at times. Another quick rant here: the technical expertise of these operators can vary greatly. The old days where TV station employed trained engineering-type folks may be largely behind us. With video production getting so much easier and more reliable, it’s felt that those people are no longer needed. Budget cuts, management styles, and attrition have cut deeply into this pool of technicians. Hence the “anything goes” attitudes.
This is not to say that standards are out the window everywhere. Folks like PBS and many of the cable outlets are still very strict on what they will accept for programming. The commercial work is another animal. When $$$’s speak, everything is just fine. Sure, we’ll put it on the air.OK, I went a little off track here. In my experience, the practice of putting still frames on the end of program segments in the US simply isn’t done. I guess my attitude is that the master control people should have a certain degree of expertise and It should not be the content providers responsibility to cover for their mistakes. If programming is times out correctly, freeze frames aren’t necessary. As for as freeze frames on the end of spots-never seen this. Ever. Just keep the commercial content under 30 seconds, give them correct levels for audio and video, test signals (bars) to set up the tape and a reasonable way to cue the spots and you should be good to go. Of course then, this applies to tape. I’m not even going to go into the problems involved with the electronic transfer of files that are starting to be requested these days. A whole new can of worms.Yikes!
OK, off of my soap box now…
Tom -
Brett,
In my 25 years in the ad biz, I saw thousands of commecials from about every director on the planet, and I’d say that your rule is wrong about half the time. 7 or 8 frames fade up and out on US spots is very common. Personally, I do all my spots this way, I don’t think a half second total of fade would make a selling difference in any spot I’ve ever seen.
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[Chris Poisson] “I don’t think a half second total of fade would make a selling difference in any spot I’ve ever seen”
Honestly I don’t think most revisions clients insist on us making “make a selling difference” in the spots.
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D’oh! Didn’t see your link to the plugin.
Maybe I should read a message all the way through properly 🙂
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