H264 For Broadcast

[Craig Seeman]

The TV Station needs to tell you the specs.

You need to be careful about how you express file sizes
12MBytes is not the same as 12mbits

I believe 30 second 12 MB file would be around 3200kb/s
At 30 seconds probably about 40MB size would be around 10,000kb/s

For HD spots using H.264 DGFastchannel Chicago wants(ed) 50,000kb/s for example. They also required Apple’s codec.

They really need to give you complete specs though. They may need slate and black at head and tail. They may have an internal workflow that you must be compatible to.

[Ryan Loetscher]

I worked for 4 years as promotions supervisor at a news station… and I know that a lot of news stations do not broadcast H.264. But it shouldn’t matter because most stations also take whatever they get if its compatible with their software and transcode it to what they use. It should be CBR… but H.264 is generic enough now that most stations should be able to use it. Problem is that, honestly, just because they’re a station, doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing. Our engineers were idiots and rejected a lot of stuff that was perfectly useable, they just didn’t know what to do with it.

For the most part you shouldn’t need to export to something as small as H.264… you should ask what they accept and give them something high quality because they are just going to transcode it anyway… it wont go to air in your codec