HD Broadcast Commercials

[Mark Suszko]

We do develop and deliver some PSA’s in HD, but it is spotty: there is a lot of confusion and gaps in who can take it and in what format they want it. And we serve a #3or #4 market. Some stations will take an HD tape but only a certain format, others can take an FTP and that’s the wave of the future, but again, all asking for different codecs and formats and delivery paths, some want the FTP file to have bars, tone, slate, countdown, others want the file to start on the first fade-up frame….

And a whole bunch run their network feeds in HD but still take all the locally inserted stuff in SD only, so we still get requests for betaSP dubs of our HD work. Makes me put a forhead-shaped dent in the desk top to hear that. I am so hoping that Bluray evolves into a common hard-media standard, and one standardized FTP in 720/24p for everything else, because I’ll be hornswaggled if I’ll ship out hard drives or data cards that will never come back.

[Todd Terry]

Well, I’ve been pleased with how easy it has been to just hand them a file on a Data DVD and they just pop it right in a server (we could FTP it, but the television station is literally within walking distance of our studio).

I’m just looking for ideas on improving the way it looks on the air. It looks good… very good… but I think it can be better. I guess I won’t be satisfied until it looks as good in my house as it does here watching a master at the office. Or at least close.

T2

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

[Mark Suszko]

If you’re talkng about that hospital thing, it looks darned good indeed. As far as what happend once it gets inside the station’s shop… I don’t know that you can protect the quality past that point. Many stations have internal signal flow and QC processes from hell, and you can’t change that from outside. You can only give them your best and hope.

[Chris Blair]

Todd,

I responded in the compression forum.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Aaron Cadieux]

Are you talking local commercials? In my region, only a very small number of stations accept HD material. Hopefully in your region stations are more with the times. It’s sad when people shoot in HD and have no way to deliver in HD. Meanwhile other people have their SD spots upconverted to HD and they look like crap.

[Todd Terry]

Yes, Aaron… commercials.

Yes, we have one station in our market that accepts HD commercials… or, at least they did ours, which was the very first one they accepted and first one in the market.

I’m just trying to improve the way it looks on air. I have no troubles with getting them to do it, accept it, or try it, or play out of the HD servers… I just think the on-air results could be better. There are some very minor (but noticeable, at least to me) compression issues going on.

T2

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

[Aaron Cadieux]

Todd,

It’s funny you mention compression issues. I send spots out of here on a regular basis that look very clean, and the quality is very high. We distribute most of our spots using DGFastChannel. The files we provide DG look fantastic, but once I see them on the air, they look TERRIBLE. There is definatley some re-compression going on with television stations. It’s very frustrating to see what should be a high-quality spot on the air that ends up looking like crap. Most of the time the compression results in a washed-out look with boxy pixels making up the image. It sounds like your situation isn’t quite as dramatic.

-Aaron

[Todd Terry]

[Aaron Cadieux] “It sounds like your situation isn’t quite as dramatic.”

No, actually it’s pretty minor… just worrisome. I might be the only one who notices it, and that’s from standing two feet away from a 50″ 1080p monitor. But there is definitely some compression artifacting going on that is not in the delivered file. Would love to get rid of it… or at least reduce it.

T2

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

[Mark Suszko]

If you take their CE to lunch, mayebe you can find out what pagan rituals they perform on your work internally once you hand it off, and if you can deliver a master that is already formatted to the exact specifications of their end product that goes to air… maybe then you could impreve on it a little. The objective would be a file that is 100 percent native to their play-out server, not to what they say they take in at the front door.

[Todd Terry]

Yeah Mark… if only it were that so simple.

Like a lot of television stations, they don’t always know how they are doing everything, they just know that it works… ha.

Their CE is a heckuva nice guy and VERY helpful (we’ve been working with him directly), but he’s in a newly-inherited position. He’s one of those typical older-guy broadcast engineers, but he’s new to the CE job. They couldn’t even tell me what kind of files to try, we had to do that by trial and error. We’re playing our spots out of the same servers that broadcast “Ellen” and “Dr. Oz” for them in HD, but the guys don’t even know what kind of files those are on their system. They just hit “record” on their servers and take the feed for re-broadcast later. I do know that they record those feeds at 35Mbps, and the file we gave them is 80Mbps… so if anything I think it’d look as good or better. It’s a head scratcher.

The problem is definitely not cooperation… they’re wildly helpful, and actually excited about the prospect. But the info they seem to be able to get their hands on is a little sketchy.

T2

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