MPEG 2 Encoding for Broadcast

[Bill Davis]

I just went through the SAME run-around with a west coast broadcaster.

In the end I called one of the the stations in the time buy and asked for the “chief engineer” – what I actually got was the station in-house production guy because (as he confessed) they had SHUT DOWN master control and are currently serving all their content out of Atlanta!

Anyway he walked me through the production settings he uses directly in Final Cut Pro to output the STATIONS promo work (which are NOTHING like the published standards, btw) and that was that.

The spots (15 sec HD broadcast ads) went from about 330 megs down to about 23 megs each – and are looking FABULOUS on the air.

Then to my surprise with the second flight of spots – I did ALL the spots with those same settings and not a SINGLE station rejected them.

YMMV. This worked LAST week – no guarantees that it will work NEXT week.

The best strategy is to call someone beyond the media buyer and/or sales people and get to someone who does the station’s in-house work and ask THEM what they REALLY need.

You might be surprised.

I sure was.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s easy, for the most part.

Premiere Pro/Adobe Media Encoder, use the MPEG-2>1080i 29.97 fps preset and change the following on the video tab:

-Field Order: Change to lower
-Under GOP Settings, change every setting to read 1. This will create an I-Frame only, closed GOP.
-Not sure what 24Mbit refers to. You may need to check back to see if they want a Constant Bitrate file, or if 24Mbit is the maximum stream size including audio. You would change this in the bitrate section regardless.
-They didn’t give you audio specs, or at least you didn’t post them.

For your knowledge, the preset multiplexes into a “standard” mpg file, this is a Program Stream.

Preset is Main Profile/High Level, this is 4:2:0. There is a special profile setting for 4:2:2