Preparing After Effects commercial for TV

[Todd Morgan]

Your first issue is delivering your spot as a DVD file. There is your first problem. Why a station is asking for a DVD doesn’t make any sense. DVD mpeg compression will reduce your file quality. Are there no other delivery formats they can take?

[Bill Russell]

What are your dimensions, resolution, codec? What do you feed to iDVD? Meanwhile, I’ll make some guesses and recommendations:

If you’re generating and/or compositing graphics, then you may be noticing augmented issues from graphics and their colors.

Are you rendering to DV and then putting it in iDVD? DV has 4:1:1 color space which really uglifies detail around strong colors, and then that gets compounded when converted to DVD’s 4:2:0 color space. I don’t use iDVD, but if memory serves, it can only accept a DV file, is that right? In any case, if you can, export not as DV but as uncompressed or animation or max quality photo jpeg (pjpg saves space over the other two). You’ll want to encode two-pass at highest manageable bitrate (not too high or disk won’t play).

If you cannot encode from a non-DV source in iDVD, then… In Encore, Compressor or DVD Studio Pro you can encode DVD media from any high quality codec, and will get better results than from DV. If you don’t have any of these, google the internet for good DVD encoding software.

Other tips:

— Don’t put whites at 255. Keep then down around 229 at max. Will look better when broadcast.

— Likewise, make sure you have blacks near the bottom.

— Reign in saturation a whole lot. I think you’ll find that a bit less goes a long way after converted to broadcast video.

— You’ll actually want the mid-ranges too to be darker than what looks good on a computer screen. Strong imagery on a computer screen gets blown out in broadcast.

In normal situations, a professional would “color correct” your work to reign it in for pleasing video broadcast. But local access doesn’t have resources for that. You’ll want to “think TV”, realizing that your computer screen is not a good guide. You need whites to actually be slightly gray looking on your computer screen at their whitest, colors not too saturated, and mid-tones to be deep.

Broadcast limits are quite a bit more narrow than what you can see on your comptuter screen. Whites over 235 get clipped in broadcast, as do saturated colors. In other words, if you have a lot of detail in these upper areas, it gets thrown away! If your source before encoding is DV, that’ll make this too bright and too strong color problem all the more.

Let us know if any of this makes a difference!

“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –

And more…

[Bill Russell]

I worked in local access in the early 90’s. Local access is a very important resource, but they typically have almost no personnel nor money, and are technologically rudimentary. I was in a city of forty thousand people total, and we broadcast from banks of VHS running at slow speed (to save tape costs and labor — only ONE paid employee for 24/7/365!) It’s not about quality, it’s about getting essential material out there on a shoestring.

Obviously no commercial broadcast station would ever source from a DVD, ever. But this is a local access channel, and it seems Meredith’s only options are DVD or pay ten bucks a pop of her own pocket to deliver each movie file. That adds up in the shoe string world. 🙂

“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –

And more…

[First Last]

You said other commercials look fine. Try asking them (producers of the other commercials) what they deliver.

I worked at a news station for awhile and they could only put certain Quicktime codecs from FCP in the system (something like DVCPro50, I think).

You’re better off asking the people you’re delivering it to, or even better, going down to the station with a few different formats. They should be able to throw something up on a live feed’thing’a’ma’jig that will give you an idea of what the final quality would be.

Production Associate
Bend, Oregon, United States

[Meredith Norwood]

I don’t know if the problem is when i start out creating the spot, should i be making it for standard tv? widescreen? HD?

what’s the best way to send it out so that all the varieties of tvs are covered?

Do most tv stations send out several versions?

Or does the tv station play one version that is reduced automatically, according to what tv its playing on?

If I create an HD widescreen version, will it work on standard tv as well?

And also, if I create widescreen, will some people’s tvs have the black bars at the bottom and top? or will it cut off the sides? (i’d prefer cutting off the sides)

[Chris Filiano]

some broadcasters and cable networks will accept commercials on HDCAM,HDCAM-SR,or DVCPRO-HD tape formats,or as Quicktime,MPEG-2,or Windows Media Video file formats.