Steps for taking project to broadcast ready commercial?

[John Rofrano]

I was the finishing editor for the PBS series “Painting & Travel with Roger and Sarah Bansemer” for the first three seasons and Roger (who is a member here at the COW) and I did everything right in Vegas Pro. He would send me completely finished shows on a hard drive for me to finish edit and I would send him back the project file for his final render.

I would start with color correcting. First I would match scenes because Roger does a lot of work outdoors and the clouds go in and out making the light changes noticeable. He also uses 3 cameras, one on himself, one on his easel and another from a different vantage point. I would do these corrections either at the media level or event level. I would also use my scopes to ensure that the colors and levels were broadcast safe. Sometimes he would have white on his pallet that was too bright or reds that were too saturated so I’d use the Secondary Color Corrector to just tone down these areas. Then I would move on to color grade the whole video at the track level giving it a slight “S” with Color Curves to create a dynamic range that was more film-like while preserving Roger’s original paintings because they still needed to look natural. Once I got the video broadcast safe I would place the Sony Broadcast filter on the master video bus to to be sure I didn’t miss anything.

Then I’d move over to the audio. You won’t find a better audio editor than Vegas Pro so no need to export audio and work on it in a different program. In the early days PBS had different levels for music, dialog, and sound fx so I would route those separate tracks to their own audio bus where I could control them individually. Later PBS changed their specs to just give an overall average loudness so I didn’t have to do that anymore. I would use compression on the dialog tracks to smooth out the speaking levels and pretty much left the music tracks alone. Once I mixed everything to the proper levels (-24 dB +/- 2dB Average Loudness) I would place Wave Hammer on the master audio bus as a brick wall limiter because -10dB was the maximum volume that was allowed. It’s important to note that Vegas Pro does not have a Loudness Meter so this cannot be done without 3rd party plug-ins. I started my career as a musician working in recording studios so I understood audio way before I ever understood Video so all of this is second nature to me but I understand that someone who has only done video might find the audio piece overwhelming.

Finally, we would render the final product as Sony MXF HD422 50Mbps and Roger would watch it for any jump cuts or other timing problems. Then he would send the Sony MXF files off to a post house to have HDCAM tapes made because PBS would only accept HDCAM tape. They have since changed and now they accept files.

Ron if you need help, you can contact me via my web site and I’d be happy to help you through the first couple of commercials until you understand what needs to be done. I could even do it for you. The point is, it’s a lot easier for me to show you on your own material than to explain the technique in a forum post. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Ron Whitaker]

Thanks, John. Much of what I’ll be doing will be for the web, but when the broadcast commercial stuff starts coming in, I’ll definitely be contacting you for advice.

Question:

1) Did you/do you do all your audio editing within Vegas, or do you take it out to Sound Forge? I thought I had read a post by you at one point that you take a lot of audio out to SF? Is that even necessary?

2) What do you use for color correcting? I’ve been looking at Magic Bullet Looks, but am also realizing now the importance of learning Adobe AE, which does color correcting as well.

Thanks!

[John Rofrano]

[Ron Whitaker] “1) Did you/do you do all your audio editing within Vegas, or do you take it out to Sound Forge? I thought I had read a post by you at one point that you take a lot of audio out to SF? Is that even necessary?”

I do “audio surgery” in Sound Forge. If I need to apply noise reduction on bad audio or something like that, I will do it in SF and bring the cleaned up audio back into Vegas Pro. That still doesn’t negate the fact that the cleaned up audio still needs to be mixed with the rest of the program material in Vegas. So all of my mixing and mastering is done in Vegas Pro.

[Ron Whitaker] “2) What do you use for color correcting? I’ve been looking at Magic Bullet Looks, but am also realizing now the importance of learning Adobe AE, which does color correcting as well.”

We used a combination of the built-in Vegas color correcting tools and Magic Bullet. The nice thing about Magic Bullet is that you can apply masks and get more control over how and what you correct. Vegas Pro 12.0 now has the ability to have a mask affect the FX filters but we did most of those shows with Vegas Pro 10 and Magic Bullet is really nice for this sort of thing. I’ve never used AE for color correcting. I don’t see the need.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com