Following up re: digital delivery

[Bob Zelin]

wow, this came up today. I never got involved with digital delivery, and now I am begin asked about it. And of course, everyone wants to spend AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE (gee, what a surprise), so “yousendit” came up. The basic idea is to get an .mpg file over a ftp network, so it can be loaded on a server (in my example, a 360 Systems Maxx 500) for on air playback. The files have to come from a station in Puerto Rico, and wind up in Florida for the latin-american market. Now, would DG/Pathfinder, etc. work – of course they would work, but what is the CHEAP solution that works.

And yes, I know that yousendit (even in pro versions) has a 2 Gig file limit. (for a little more detail in what is being attempted so you can laugh, Fed Ex of DVD’s of the shows in .vob file format that have to be converted to .mpg to get them on the servers).

Yes, this is a timely discussion.

Bob Zelin

[Rich Rubasch]

Ok, I’ll follow a Zelin post…

DG Fastchannel – Been using them for a year or so. Very convenient and reliable. Using Episode to encode to their unique MPEG-2 requirements. I charge same as a Betacam tape, however if there are multiple spots to a single station I charge a bit more. Quality is fine and their service has improved over time. Big plus…stations love them.

FTP site – We set up a Buffalo Terastation to hold about 1 terabyte of SD promos for BBC and American Public Television. It is local at our facility so getting files to it is a snap. We allow anonymous access via any web browser and set it up to be accessed via port 9000 or FTP port 21 with simple web redirects….in other words they type in our web url with a directory name and it takes them to the file list. they right-click to save. So far it has been working swimmingly. We only had to increase our internet upload speeds at the shop to meet the bandwidth requirements….we are at 4 meg upload.

Station’s FTP site – I have FTP folders on two network and one cable providers sites. I upload files to their directories with files to their specs (HD or SD) and they retrieve them. This system is ok, but not as bulletproof as DG. I have to make sure they got the file and have to make sure they QC the darn thing.

DG Fastcahnnel gives me most piece of mind…clients love getting the order from DG stating that everything has been delivered. It is like a Fed Ex tracking number.

Betacam still works locally, but if I send out spots statewide I encourage DG Fastchannel. If it only is going to a couple local stations I will try to use the “sneakernet” method of dropping a file on the local station’s FTP site.

Need more?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Tim Wilson]

[Rich Rubasch] “Need more?”

You mention a unique MPEG-2 format for DG Fastchannel? Without giving away any of their trade secrets 🙂 can you say more about what it is? Even generally.

Also, what file formats are the FTP folks looking for?

This is actually a question I have for everybody – what kinds of files are you working with? What are the recipients looking for? Are there standards emerging?

Thanks, kids. Keep ’em coming.

tw

[Mark Raudonis]

Digital delivery? Funny you should ask.

Short form has been into digitial delivery for awhile now, but only this year have we heard from multiple networks that they want their long form programming delivered digitally as well. You’ve gotta use WAN acceleration or have extremely fat pipes.

Here’s a couple of vendors I’m familiar with in this space:

https://www.apseratech.com

https://www.signiant.com/-1/Solutions/Broadcast/

File formats: Quick time prores seems to keep ’em happy.

mark

[Todd Terry]

We’re still doing a little bit of uploading… not tons but some.

Mostly our stuff goes to DG Fastchannel, Knology, Comcast, and FTP’d directly to a couple of movie theatres (commercials shown in their pre-shows before the movie trailers).

The files look good, the transfers upload fine, the stuff looks ok on the air.

But…

Invariably, it takes a couple of emails and a couple of more calls for the recipient to find the files we have uploaded. A notification system that seems automatic (or should be), sure seems to have kinks in it. It always takes a least a couple of emails and usually a couple of phone calls before they can find our spots. INVARIABLY. Even though we do uploads to the letter, put things exactly where and how they are supposed to be, and send the requisite notification uploads. Usually after the second or third call we’ll hear “Looking, looking…. oh! Yes, there they are. Yes, right where they are supposed to be.”

It gets a little tiresome.

If they can hammer the kinks out of that, we’ll be happy.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[John Davidson]

We’ve dealt with Discovery nets using YouSendIt for short form media. They still prefer tapes, but sometimes they have an emergency project that just has to be there in 2 hours. In those instances we send you a 1080i pro res quicktime straight out of FCP and it imports directly into their Avids.

I still prefer tape for now. 5 more years of exponential storage bumps and internet speeds and that may change.

When we all have 100 up/down FiOs we’ll laugh about this question. And we’ll cry about the money we spent on decks.

[Tim Wilson]

[John Davidson] “In those instances we send you a 1080i pro res quicktime straight out of FCP and it imports directly into their Avids.”

I assume that the files are still under 2GB, right? I know that ProRes compresses nicely, and that there are different flavors of ProRes, but how *long* is a typical 2GB file of 1920×1080 that you send? Five minutes? 30?

Or are you sending via another method than YouSendIt?

[John Davidson] “I still prefer tape for now.”

I agree that tape is still king. Even places with tapeless infrastructures are still often taking delivery on tape, so that THEY can manage the file formatting, rather than wrestling with whatever you’ve mangled.

But as mentioned on the original thread, sometimes you have to send 100 spots in different formats to different places – definitely a job for digital delivery….

[Alex Elkins]

Hi all,

I’m in the UK and all of our SD commercials are delivered as files in PhotoJPEG format. We first upload to a company called Adway, who check the legality of the ad (as in the content, not technical), then upload to another company Adstream who QC and deliver via satellite to the stations. Delivery instructions are placed on their website, the orders paid for and then they’re with the stations within an hour or so. It works quite efficiently, the only bottleneck ever really being our upload time, although for 60″ ads it’s not a big issue.

There are now a few broadcasters (particularly the smaller ones who presumably have less invested in tape systems) who are happy to accept larger files delivered on a harddrive. The larger broadcasters have been much slower to adopt this practice.
Personally I’m all for it. I entered the industry quite recently at a time where tapeless acquisition was just being adopted, so putting something onto tape seems almost backward to me, as long as the quality is the same. The greatest value in tape formats now is for archive, in my opinion. Files on a computer can’t compete with the benefit of physically putting a tape on a shelf, which is why I don’t think it will be superseded too soon.

I’ve recently started using Dropbox for sending files to clients and so far I like it AND it’s free! There is of course a storage limit, but you can pay monthly to have more space.

Alex Elkins

Salad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
Check out my latest addition to the Creative Cow Reels Section

[Tim Wilson]

[Alex Elkins] “I’m in the UK”

Nice! Thanks! I was hoping for some folks outside the US to chime in on this.

Not that the US contingent should be done just yet. 🙂 I simply mean to say that I’m actively soliciting input from the entire world…

Thanks again,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

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[Rich Rubasch]

For direct to station delivery, H264 is the norm, but proRes is gaining ground.

We just did a test to take Canon 5D footage to an older Vegas system on a PC and a PC Premier system. Both PC systems have QT Pro installed. I encoded just about every flavor of 1080i footage, DVCProHD, HDV, MPEG-2 etc, and the final delivery to both was ProRes. Says a lot. I also have Media Composer on my PC and ProRes works fine in HD and SD.

So it is my hope that ProRes becomes the new PhotoJPEG so we can stop guessing at what format will work.

For now our local stations take straight DV, H264 for HD and MPEG-2.

As for DGs custom MPEG-2 format, it is an 18000mbps CBR MPEG-2 but they add 16 lines of “VBI space color” to the top of the file, meaning the encoded movie has an extra black bar at the top.

Audio goes out MPEG Layer II at 384Kbps.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com