How to deliver spots to stations digitally

[Jerry Alto]

Joseph- I am going to make the assumption that you digitized the footage as DVCPro50 and edited in FCP in DVCPro50 native timeline. The first step is to find out from the station if they have FCP/Quicktime with the DVCPro50 codec. The most direct question would be to ask, ‘can I deliver the spot as a DVCPro50 quicktime movie on a firewire drive or DVDRom?’ If they say yes then export (File menu>export>quicktime movie. We edit and export our 1/2 hour TV show as 8-bit uncompressed quicktime movies (about 34 gigs) and deliver on firewire drives to our dub house for layoff to tape.

Hope this helps.

Jerry

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[Matthew Brunn]

You can give the cable or TV stations any format and they will slaughter it. First they don’t air your file. It is typically loaded onto their spot real that being a tape or server. Either way it is out of your hands.

Hope this helps-
Matthew
Quad 2.5 G5
OSX 10.4.X
Ram 4GB
FCP 5.1/AE 6.5/DVDSP4

[Joseph Wilkins]

Matthew,

So you are saying there is NOTHING I can do??

[Jeremy Garchow]

That compression could be do to whatever your cable/satellite provider is doing to the image. the tv show ‘Lost’ looks like absolute crap on my tv, always the same tearing and digital junk in that show for some reason. The best thing you can do is deliver the highest quality master you can (Digibeta @ 10bit for instance) and hope you local cable folks get it right.

Jeremy

[Chris Borjis]

Are you watching Lost in HD? It looks amazing over the air on my setup.

The stations are ultimately going to render it into an mpeg2 transport stream.

Call them and ask for the specs.

You could easily do it with compressor and deliver a gorgeous picture that
would fit on a CD.

More stations ought to be doing this as it would save the millions of beta/digi beta tape
stock that gets used each year.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Borjis] “Are you watching Lost in HD? It looks amazing over the air on my setup.”

Nope. Plain ole Sd CRT. I don’t know what the deal is with that show, there’s always digital white fuzz on all the highlights. It’s only that show and it happens on every show. It’s truly some sort of strange anomaly.

Jeremy

[Mark Maness]

Here’s my two cents… for whatever its worth.

I have found out that TV stations are going to do whatever they want to do to get the program to air. All we can do as production houses is to deliver the product in the best possible format that we have available. If they specify a format, then you need to follow that format. If they don’t, contact them an ask what are the formats they use.

We shoot in HDV and XDCAM. There are absolutle no stations that use those formats for air just yet (in the outdoors industry). We have to dub all of our finished product to BetaSP for the moment.

So…. what it comes down to is the best for what we have to deliver the product. Keep in mind, that all cable and satellite networks always compress their programs to MPEG2 for distribution. Depending on who they are depends on the quality of the signal. NBC and ESPN are going to be crystal clear as compared to The Outdoor Channel, who is a lesser network in the eyes of the distributor.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions

[T. Payton]

I would recommend you contact the station and speak with someone in master control or traffic in regards to which format they can take. If they can only take SD insertions (which is probably the case) Beta SP and Digibeta are THE standards in the industry, but they might be open to taking others (DVD for example). if Beta and DigiBeta is all they take then contact a local post house that has a FCP system and have them dub it to Beta or DigiBeta from your original files. If a local post house doesn’t have FCP, you could try making a DVD with the highest quality settings (use compressor 60 minute high quality widescreen) and they can make a dub from that to Beta or DigiBeta.

If by some miracle, the cable folks can take a HD insertion, and you don’t have a local post house that can do this, try Digital film tree at https://www.digitalfilmtree.com/. They are a FCP shop in LA and can make a pristine dub of your 720p edit (from a Hard Drive or DVD-Rom) to HD or SD format that your station will need.

BTW, in all likelihood when you sent over a DV formated spot, they brought that into their NLE and made a Beta Dub from the NLE. If they are on an Avid (likely) they had a heck of a time converting your DV file to something playable. So the fact that your DV dub looks poor when aired is probably in their attempt to deal with your DV files. DV is not a horrid format. 9 times out of 10 I make a MiniDV copy of a spot and have my post house make Beta dubs from that. As long as you ensure that you are happy with the qualtity of your Beta dub that your giving the stations, you should be fine.

T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque, NM

[Walter Biscardi]

[ttpayton] ”
I would recommend you contact the station and speak with someone in master control or traffic in regards to which format they can take.”

Absolutely. It really doesn’t matter how you’ve captured or edited the project, each station / network has specific guidelines on what can be submitted for air. Contact the station and they will tell what format(s) to deliver on.

If you’re delivering to more than one station, contact each one of them.

As a rule, most all stations will still accept BetaSP.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

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[Frank Nolan]

[ttpayton] “If a local post house doesn’t have FCP, you could try making a DVD with the highest quality settings (use compressor 60 minute high quality widescreen) and they can make a dub from that to Beta or DigiBeta.”

Yikes!!!!!
Take a DVCPro50 timeline, compress it to M-peg2 for DVD then lay that to a Digibeta or BetaSP, which will then more than likely be compressed to m-peg2 again for transmission? That will surely look horrible.
I think it would be better and cheaper for him to just rent a BetaSP deck and lay it off straight from the DVCPRo50 timeline.