FCP to broadcast delivery?

[Doug Beal]

depends on how far you want to go it alone.
monitoring,measurement, capture and disk arrays are required for high end situations as well as tape machines.
to put a complete system unless you have a fair amount of technical knowledge you would be better off consulting a Value added reseller.
That being said, there are many stages in the workflow where a relationship with a post house can be of great benefit. you can minimize your investment in hardware and maximize your creative flow. they might capture or prep offline for you, when your are done master and verify legal audio and video.
If you want to color correct monitoring (check out FSI) and something like a Kona3 are critical if 2K and down.Lhi if 1080 is as high as you want to go.

Doug Beal
Editor / Engineer
Rock Creative Images
Nashville TN

[Craig Russillroy]

I have edited and delivered loads of commercials in both England and Australia – all I have to say is – you need the right people to run the kit – if you went out and bought a Flame and jaed it in your bedroom that doesn’t make you s compositer

No you don’t need to spend 400 in a post house but remember nit only are you getting a lovely coffee you ate also getting the support – expertise – wizdom an security of delivering a Broadcast master

MINTedit

Editing – VFX -Digital Signage – Digital Pipeline Solutions

MACproo – All the bits and bobs

[Alex Elkins]

[Stephen Trombley] “What do I need in the way of hardware and software that would take me through all stages of post-production to deliver a broadcast master”

Hi Stephen,

As I’m in the UK, my answer is based on the figures I know in the industry here. Hopefully it is still of some use to you.

To put together an FCP machine capable of online editing here are the main things you need (in my opinion):

– Mac Pro, with 8GB RAM or more
– AJA Kona 3 (or LHi if you’re not working at 2K, i.e. RED camera etc)
– Calibrated monitor (FSI seem to be popular and very competitively priced)
– Fast storage – we use a local fibre channel RAID here. You could get away with an e-SATA array. If you have more than one machine you may consider shared storage.
– Final Cut Studio (obviously!)
– The usual peripherals – monitors, speakers etc

All of that can come in at around £15,000 (pounds not dollars!) and from there really you can add as much to it as you like. VTRs, bigger and better monitors etc.

Basically a Final Cut online system is very good value.

All the best,
Alex Elkins

[Walter Biscardi]

Wow, didn’t know folks could still charge $400/hour these days.

We’ve been laying off broadcast work since 2001 with FCP and broadcast HD for about 4 or 5 years now.

You can click on my profile to see exactly what we run, but in short.

Mac Pro with FCP (6 or 7 depending on the workstation)
AJA Kona 3 for I/O and Up / Downconversion in realtime
40TB of very high speed arrays.
Apple Color for color enhancement and Broadcast Safe
A variety of VTRs for layback.
The Flanders Scientific (FSI) line of HD reference monitors

You can keep a show fully broadcast safe in FCP as well, I have a recipe for that in my Blog and you can also full color grade it there too. Color is much better with many more controls.

That equipment, along with the proper knowledge, gets you delivering broadcast directly from FCP. If you do everything right, you pass quality control and your’e good to go.

Notice I don’t mention any sound requirements in there, we generally send our broadcast work to a sound designer for full sound mixes on our broadcast work except for the news stories we deliver. For those we just mix right in FCP.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.

Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital.

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[Jason Livingston]

Hi Stephen,
If you’re airing in the USA or Canada, don’t forget about closed captioning software. Sending tapes out to get captioned has a lot of drawbacks and is more expensive and time consuming in the long run. You can do all of your own captioning in house to save time & money and also ensure quality control stays in your own hands.

The good news is that the legacy caption encoding hardware is no longer necessary, it can all be done in software right on your NLE systems.

Thanks,

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Michael Gissing]

FCP is capable of picture finishing for broadcast and like Walter, I have been using it to deliver HD & SD broadcast programs since version 4.5. A good monitor to grade on and good cabling to get the computer and drive out of the room are essential to making a proper environment to present your final online to clients. Biggest expense will be broadcast tape machines like digi beta and HDCam. Also think long and hard about a decent patching/ routing system. Buy good speakers!

The weak point is audio. FCP is crude and Soundtrack Pro is still a toy. Broadcast deliverables for audio really need a better edit/ mix system, particularly as undipped stem pre mixes are required. The sort of routing and dynamics control required means that all our work is done using a Fairlight and just our final compressor limiters cost more than a MacPro & FCP combined.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Jason Livingston] “You can do all of your own captioning in house to save time & money and also ensure quality control stays in your own hands. “

That’s one place I would disagree with, especially HD captioning. We’ve been sending out masters to CaptionMax going on about three or four years now. Extremely reasonable pricing and one or two day turnarounds are standard. They have awesome quality control as well.

I really don’t want to deal with captions, even if the software is available when we have such great and easy folks to work with like them. The really cool thing is they also do the audio captioning which gets us even more carry on PBS stations and is becoming a bigger part of the captioning market.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.

Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital.

Blog!

Twitter!

[Jason Livingston]

Hi Walter,
I respect your opinion and certainly captioning is not something that everyone should get into. That’s why caption service companies exist and there are some great ones out there.

However, I think you could make the same argument for going 3rd party for color correction or audio finishing. There are a lot of specialized companies who can do color correction & audio finishing with fast turnarounds and reasonable pricing, so why should anyone do them in house? Probably because you want to maintain creative & quality control, because deadlines only get tighter never looser, and because the on-going costs cut into your profit margin.

The OP was asking for a solution that would take them all the way to a broadcast-ready master. I would argue that closed captioning is just as necessary as color correction, if not more so, because captioning is a legal requirement for broadcast and color correction is not.

Other than saving time & money, some of the other reasons it is important to bring captioning in-house:

If there are any last-minute changes needed to the video, a 1-2 day turnaround might not cut it.

If you need to make multiple versions for different markets, or re-edit a previously captioned master, or deliver in multiple formats (Web, podcast, tapeless, etc.), having the capability to at least edit & re-purpose captions in-house can save you a ton of money, time, and grief, even if you use a service for the bulk of the captioning work.

Jason Livingston
CPC

[Stephen Trombley]

Thanks Doug. You’ve got me thinking.

[Stephen Trombley]

Knowing how to operate MS Word doesn’t make you Ernest Hemingway.