Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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Well, much of the work of a Producer is the business side of things, so running your own production company will most likely be good experience. The potential down side is that you could end up spending your whole life running the company and not have time to develop your creative side, but tbh I have no way of knowing whether that’s a pitfall that would affect you or not.
Right path? No idea, but as you’ve made a start I’d say it’s worth giving it your best shot, don’t be a quitter man, you never really know where a path will end up taking you.
Meaning of life? If I knew that I wouldn’t be sitting here typing replies on my computer to people I’ve never met! Or maybe I would, who knows…
Good luck, I hope things work out
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“In The Blink Of An Eye” by Walter Murch and “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film” by Michael Ondaatje are still at the top of my list for craft editing, and I would second “Ogilvy On Advertising” as the must-read book on the subject.
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For an overview of what broadcast spec is in the UK, this should help
https://www.channel4.com/media/documents/commissioning/PROGRAMME%20MANAGEMENT/TechnicalStandardsforC4ProgrammeDelivery_v2.2_Feb2012.pdf[Specs will be different in different territories so you should get a set from one or more of the mainstream broadcasters where you are.]
I’ve never come across anyone willing to accept H264. Broadcasting is generally a version of MPEG2, but many places accept a high quality file and create the broadcast data stream themselves. It’s unnecessary to go uncompressed, usually ProRes 422 (or 422HQ) or DNxHD (at one of the higher data rates) is fine but you do have to check because different places accept different things. If a station wants you to create an MPEG transport stream they will give you the spec they want.
As a rule broadcasters want 50Mbps 4:2:2 as a minimum, but a lot of 35Mbps 4:2:0 (usually XDCam) does get transmitted.
Frame rate conversions have to be by “motion predictive” conversion (sometimes called motion vector), frame repeating or dropping is not acceptable. That really means proper standards conversion software, not what you get from low cost file conversion programs.
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The first thing I’d do would be to check the audio settings – is it 48kHz 16bit? FCP will handle other settings but not happily, so convert it if it’s different.
2nd thing would be to break it into sections using the audio editor of your choice, then import them and see whether a series of smaller files work ok.
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[Rafael Amador] “By 1994/5 we have all the AD converters 10b-YUV in PAL land. That was already the broadcast standard for A/D conversion. 8b A/D was not Broadcast.”
Well, you might have done, WE didn’t. OTOH I was mainly cutting sport fast-turnaround for auntie at the time and we used whatever we were given. Broadcast spec where I was working in the ’90s was “D1”, i.e., 8 bit as specified in ITU-R Rec 601, black on 16, white on 235, etc (we might have been using 10 bit signals but IMO they weren’t really 10 bit video until the picture sources became 10 bit origination and that was later).
Really IABMCTT and rather ancient history now anyway (it’s well over a decade since I moved to non-linear workstations).
🙂
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I might point out that I’m in PAL land and things are different in PAL compared to NTSC. This is a scan from Sony’s old technical manual for the DVW-A500P:
The move to 10 bit is more recent than my changing to hardly ever touching tape any more, in the ’90s I don’t recall anything being originated in 10 bit so the 10 bit signal going down the 270mbps SDI connection was always upconverted from 8 bit.
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Digibeta 10bit compressed????? It was 8 bit lossless for all the years I used it, the only 10bit part was the SDI connections.
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I guess that they need the ProApps codecs, which can be downloaded here
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1396 -
I don’t really use enough different software to give a comparison, but what I find makes a big difference is doing a two pass conversion. It’s enormously beneficial and doesn’t actually make the final file much bigger than a single pass conversion does.
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I usually find that an export to quicktime in same settings takes something more like a third of the running time. OTOH, that’s using FW800 drives, so it might possibly be that the USB3 connection is an issue but that’s only a guess as I haven’t used USB3 for media yet.
You might find that stitching the files together with something like MPEG Streamclip might be quicker but again that’s a bit of a guess until you actually do a test.