Final Digital Product Delivery

[Bob Zelin]

You write –

If we are all moving toward digital delivery in broadcast products, why are so many stations, and broadcasters still focusing on “intermediary transfer” equipment? Is anyone actually going to broadcast or project fully uncompressed digital media?

REPLY – because no one can afford the bandwidth. Video servers are too expensive to tie up a pipe for uncompressed HD. MPEG2 works much better for them. This is what so many products (like DG Systems, Vela, etc.) use. Video servers like AVID Unity ISIS operate at DNxHD145 (145mb/sec), becuase they don’t have the bandwidth to run uncompressed HD. These products cost a lot of money as it is, and no one (not even the big boys) wants to spend even more. No one really gives a crap about quality. Well, not the stations.

You write –
If a transport stream, or program stream on a server is the final point of departure before viewing, then why are we not working on direct file transfer? I’ve had a lot of my friends that work in broadcast facilities tell me, they do not want to be turned into a dub house by being the ones who transfer a digital file to tape, then into the broadcast computer. As a business owner I don’t want to be paying for endless intermediary formats to accomplish the transfer, when a direct digital transfer seems to be the best answer.

REPLY – you are very innocent. This all comes down to MONEY. I will give you a good recent story from last week. Client does work using cards (like P2). The station that will air their media (ABC affiliate) will ONLY accept a Sony Beta or Panasonic DVCProHD VIDEOTAPE. Obvious question – if their news crews all use P2, and they are injesting P2 all day long to cut the news, how come out of house production can’t deliver a P2 card. BECAUSE THEY CANT BE BOTHERED, they just want the monkeys in the machine room to pop in a tape, not be trained on how to handle media formats. EVERYONE wants to deliver media (on drives), and not buy an expensive HD VTR. But no one will accept this. WHY ? You go fight with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Discovery, PBS, etc.

It seems the old way of thinking about transfers still exists without a real reason. (Edit to tape, play back tape)

REPLY – if you want to deliver one of 10 million file formats, it is difficult for someone else to accept, unless you follow your exact file format. I see this in post houses. Client X wants to bring their drives to big post house, but big post house owns big Apple XSAN with XServe RAIDs, and has no ability to accept clients SATA drives, even though they are the same media format. Why – Money !

you write –
The IO cards and devices folks are using, are creating emulated outputs for recording to tape? And this is where it doesn’t make sense to me. If the outputs of the devices are emulating the inputs needed for the recording devices, can they be programmed to go to the server direct? It seems the signal needed for the broadcast server is actually alive at the end of the IO devices, and with a pre-roll emulation the cards could go directly to the master control server.

REPLY – because the world still uses tape. EVERYONE still uses Beta. Even you have Beta footage that you have to incorporate into your shows (and if you don’t, you are 23 years old, and should shut up right now). Is Beta dead? You bet it is – but it is still widely used. I totally agree with you – but the world moves slowly.

you write –
In my mind the path would be Digital File-IO( example AJA)-Various servers. All of us who produce digital media are capable of making drag and drop transport streams, but i’ve been told this is too great of a quality control risk.

REPLY – so how easy would it be for everyone on this forum to say “we will use single FW800 drives as our universal transfer medium”. Who creates the compression standard ? Who creates the frame rate standard ? Who says 720 or 1080i, or 480i (or 1080p) – who ? You ? This is a BATTLE even with TAPE delivery. THERE ARE NO STANDARDS dopey ! It was bad enough with NTSC and PAL analog, and now, it’s out of control. I know – how about you and me go execute the SMPTE committee for allowing this to happen. Because I AGREE WITH YOU – there should be standards, and we should be doing digital delivery on drives or electronic transfer. Who will enforce this standard. How do we get Discovery Network to listen to what ABC Network wants to do ?

Bob Zelin

[Tracy Smith]

Mr. Zelin,
I know this a bit late, I just saw your response. Thank You. The format issues drive me up the wall.
And station folks 4 months away from a digital switch over who are still thinking analog, or not even realizing at this point what they are dealing with are sending me over the edge. When I wrote that post I had just returned from a station master control, to view how they were ingesting an HD spot we had made, the MC op showed me his HD monitor he was using, and all I saw was the same monitor I had seen 6 years ago with an HD-SD letterbox feed, he wasn’t looking at an HD signal. This kind of stuff gets to me.
Digital to Digital, lets all of us save the quality of our produced stuff too.

Thanks again for taking the time to “post up” I found it enlightening!

T

[Jiri Fiala]

Why should anyone shut up if they are 23? That’s incredibly rude and might end up with you being called an old fart.