HD Broadcast Commercials

[Chris Blair]

We’ve found that many of the local stations and cable systems use Telestream products, from Telestream Episode Engine to Telestream Pipeline and all manner of versions in between.

Telestream makes GREAT products but what most of the people we’ve dealt with do is use a preset and watch folders. What happens is the file is either uploaded via FTP to a folder. Once it’s there, Telestream’s software looks at the file, determines it’s parameters, then encodes it to the station or cable system’s predetermined preset. People are not involved. The spot is then automatically routed to the appropriate server ready for air.

Let me repeat…people are not involved. NOBODY looks at the spot before it airs! So even if you give them a spot that’s in the EXACT same format and uses the EXACT same settings that their playout server requires, your file most likely gets recompressed.

What we’ve found happens quite often is that this generic system often examines files and makes mistakes. So it will look at a file that’s shot at 24P with pulldown, determine that it’s 60i, then for some reason reverse the fields in the encoded file. So you end up with video with epilepsy inducing motion judder. They’re hard to watch. Our local cable company gets promos from their national arm (which appear to either be shot of film or shot with 24P video) and consistently the fields are reversed when they air. They’ll run that way for months, heck years! I’ve complained about the problem with our spots and worked with their engineering staff repeatedly but the problem never goes away.

One of the local affiliates has the same system and has the exact same problem. Weirder still, the problem doesn’t occur on 60i or 30p projects.

I finally contacted Telestream, who was VERY helpful and responsive. They had me send them our file and determined that the station and cable system were reversing the fields and suggested I reverse the fields when I encoded it to fix the issue. The problem with there is that we’d have to output one file for these two stations, and another for the other 4 or 5 in our market, which is a recipe for disaster.

Telestream then gave me a fix to suggest to the stations, which was placing a filter in the “source” bin, which would make more calculations about the fields before determining how to encode the video to the target file. I suggested this to the stations, but only one person at both places was even allowed into the system to make changes, and you guessed it, they were unwilling to make changes to their system.

So moral to the story? We give these folks betaSP dubs when we have a spot that originated in 24P. They still get compressed a ton, but at least they get the field order right.

What I think is unacceptable is that NOBODY looks at the spots at any point in their preparation to go on the air. So you can provide a pristine product either on tape or in a compressed file, but there’s simply little chance it will look the way it’s supposed to when it airs.

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

[Todd Terry]

Yeah, Chris, I hear ya….

The 24p issue was the first one we dealt with. We do almost everything at 23.976, so that’s what we initially gave them as a master file. Unfortunately, the server didn’t recognize it to play it that way, so it played it back at 30fps… quite a bit speedy (only video, the audio played normally).

In the end, we did gave them a file from a 60i output… still looks fine, but now plays properly.

I spoke to the chief engineer again this afternoon who absolutely positively 100% swears on his life that our file is NOT being re-compressed in any way… that the path from the server through the switchers to the transmitter to my TV at home is completely direct with no recompression or alteration of the image whatsoever.

It’s complicated by the fact that there is not one single HD monitor in master control there… in fact, the only HD monitors in the whole building are off-air monitors, and there’s no routers to them or any other ways to view the signal off the server (the server monitor is downconverted NTSC screen)… other than taking our own monitor in and doing a bunch of cabling.

Further compounding the issue… a big schedule is to come, but right now this client has only bought an early morning news schedule so far… with the spots only airing for the first couple of weeks during times when I would otherwise be doing very important sleeping (not a morning person here).

I’ll give them another look again tomorrow.

T2

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

[Timothy J. allen]

T2,
I’ve felt that pain. Generally we still deliver on HDCAM masters and see our programs compressed heavily before home viewers see our content. You’ve hit it on the nail to try to trace the signal path and what happens to it in between your media and the set top boxes at home.

Generally I tend to follow PBS Red Book standards for HD video – but most places don’t have specs so well defined. (For those interested in those specifications, you can find them at https://www.pbs.org/producers/redbook/TOS_2007_Submission_8_20_07.pdf )

By the way, as to the Telestream comments earlier in the thread – we had some significant issues with Telestream compression too – but it relly wasn’t the Telestream product’s failing. The operator on one end didn’t fully understand the user settings – and they thought the final was “good enough” to leave at default settings.

Oh… and I’ll be in Huntsville at the beginning of the month for a quick NASA-related video shoot. If you aren’t swamped, I’d love to stop by your shop for a moment and finally meet you in person.

[Todd Terry]

[Timothy J. Allen] “I’ll be in Huntsville at the beginning of the month… I’d love to stop by your shop.”

Call first.

No, seriously… would love to have you. Will give you the nickle tour (it takes exactly three minutes), and let you buy me a pricey government expense-account lunch somewhere. 🙂

Ummm… nah, lunch is on me… and we’re smack downtown, only about five minutes from NASA.

T2

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