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NEED HELP
Hi all
OK having a transfer nightmare, here’s what i did: Completed a 10″ commercial to be broadcast on PAL TV. Animation is made up of illustrator files in 3d space with lots of movement working in a 1024 x 576 square pixel comp, then dropped into a PAL DV Widescreen comp and rendered out for the tranfer with lower fields first. Checked it on monitor everything fine no flicker.
Problem: sent it off for transfer onto digibeta, that was completed then sent to TV station. Now TV station is telling me that every bit of movement is jumping – flickering, and it’s too bad to go on air.
So I’m trying to work out if the problem is with me or with the tranfer company.
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Brion
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4 Replies
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Your settings sound fine to me. I’m assuming you checked it on a broadcast monitor?
Ideally, you should be able to see exactly what the station saw, or at least, to see the Digibeta tape play, and figure out what the station people were talking about.
-If fine lines were flickering, you needed a bit of blur. Motion blur on the moving stuff, or 1-px vertical blur overall should do.
-If moving objects jiggled back and forth, you reversed the field order at some point. It could be that the transfer house’s edit-to-tape system likes upper field first? If so, then, sorry, it’s on your shoulders … unless they changed systems without telling you.At any rate, you need to see that tape. Let us know how it goes.
Anybody else?
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Of course you watched the animation out on a good – preferably broadcast quality – video monitor before and after transfer to DV, and it was looking good then …? You really cannot judge video for broadcast from a computer monitor or an LCD.
Assuming it was good from your DV playback, then the DV-DigiBeta transfer would be your next suspect. But really going through DV at all was a bad move. You lose resolution and colour information by going to DV at all, and no mainstream UK broadcast channel’s engineering dept is going to be happy with a DigiBeta transfer from DV.
What you could try is contacting your transfer facility, and asking what computer output that they can handle – frame sequence, or interlaced uncompressed quicktime or avi file? That way you could hand them a full resolution, full quality output file from AE and get full broadcast quality DigiBeta in return.
Some issues which can arise going from computer to broadcast video include:
flicker , which can be caused by field order issues (in PAL, DV is lower field first and DigiBeta / everything else is upper field first), or by single-pixel lines or edges, which always look bad: a little judicious softening of edges will help.
gamma – the brightness / contrast handling can look quite different on a video monitor from Windows or Mac computer displays; and
legal video colors / video levels where AE handles RGB levels 0 – 255, for video that range has to be restricted to 16-235, even after any glows / filters / effects have been added. -
[Dave LaRonde] “You can simply render frames only and not worry about lower field first or upper field first. A plus: the resulting animation will have a more filmic motion to it.”
Good point. I rarely render fields.
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Hi all and thanx for the replys
To answer your questions on what monitor i check it on: watched it on a broadcast monitor everything was nice and smooth. Also the the format i gave to the transfer company was a uncompressed Animation QT.
Contacted the station, they checked the tape and said that some of their machines did’nt like it making it jumpy on any movement. They said they ran it through Flame and this fixed the problem but are not sure why. I’ll have a chat with the guy to see if i can work out what the problem was and let you know.
Oh think i’ll go with Daves advice and just render without fields for any PS/illustrator animations in future.
Thanks again
Brion
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