[Andrew Rendell]

Broadcasters frequently use clippers in their broadcasting chain so that they don’t broadcast unsafe levels. (N.B. I wouldn’t rely on that as it seems to be rather mixed across different broadcasters).

So in theory you could get away with delivering material with unsafe levels, but I’d ask the following questions:

If you deliver material that isn’t safe and the levels are clipped, that has an effect on the way pictures look, so are you happy for your programme to be visually degraded in that way?

Broadcasters generally specify safe levels, so if you deliver material that isn’t “safe” you’re giving them the power to either withhold payment or charge you for correcting the levels before broadcast. Is that a situation you’d be happy to be in?

Personally, safe levels are just one of many things that I want to have right out of a sense of professional pride/responsibility.

[Andrew Rendell]

It sounds like you have to deliver on tape, but it would be best to check what options are available.

As a freelance editor I don’t own any decks as I haven’t yet had a job that made owning one financially worthwhile, I take my completed files to a facility and play them out onto tape there. In order for that to work efficiently, my editing software is compatible with what they have (I therefore own Avid and FCP7).

Also, I’ve been supplying to one particular broadcaster who specifies tape delivery and I’ve come to the arrangement where I bring my drive with a file on it to their VT department and play it out to tape there (and they’re very happy for me to drop my file onto their system to do so – I don’t know whether they then use that file for anything else but they do appear to keep them).

I’d recommend sorting out your delivery arrangements before deciding which editing package to use. No doubt lots of people have their own preferences, but I have a feeling that if you arrange to finish with a file and do a playout to tape (if required) as a separate step, FCPX might work well for you.

[Andrew Rendell]

You’re doing the right thing to convert to Quicktime, but what codec are you using? It needs to be an editing one, then when you edit you should have the sequence setting on the same codec as the quicktimes to avoid having to render. IIRC, Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) or DV would be suitable for FCP5.

[Andrew Rendell]

For luminance flashes, you need to find the cuts (or effects) where they happen and reduce the brightness on the higher luminance shot and increase the brightness on the darker shot, to bring the change in brightness below the threshold of what constitutes a flash. The occasional flash is ok, 3 in a second is a fail. I don’t know of any filter that’ll do that for you.

I spent a few months preparing all the VT play-ins to a pop music show called CD:UK and we ended up putting a “Flash Gordon” (a more basic version of PSE test than the HardingFPA) in the edit suite as I had to fix something every week, even videos from very successful bands were sometimes unbroadcastable in the state they were sent to us, and although you can roughly get your eye in with a bit of practice, it saved a lot of time to use a proper flash tester.

[Andrew Rendell]

On this side of the pond the HD broadcasts are in 1080i, so it would make sense to shoot 1080, either i or p.

Several broadcasters have specified that “broadcast quality” is 50Mbps or better, but they don’t specify which codecs are acceptable or not.

TBH, I can’t really tell the difference between XDCam EX at 35Mbps and a 50Mbps version for most material, and I haven’t had an issue with material from an EX3 recently for current affairs docs, so there’s a degree of flexibility on the data rate at the moment (although I probably wouldn’t take that for granted for a long term project).

You can get technical specs from the bigger broadcasters, this is the brief overview page for Discovery –
https://dhd.discovery.com/guidelines/gallery/guidelines.pdf

It would probably be worthwhile getting hold of full delivery specs for a couple of broadcasters. Google is your friend there.

[Andrew Rendell]

There are actually two ways where you can use footage from YouTube without obtaining permission:
(1) situations that are defined under “Fair Use”, which are things like news reporting and education (e.g., showing a clip to your students in a classroom for the purpose of the lesson), but a sales presentation certainly doesn’t count for that.
(2) if the person posting the material has marked it as being in the public domain using a creative commons “CC0” declaration. Even then it’s best to tread carefully (e.g., make sure that the person who put it up actually has the right to make that declaration).

Number of times/copies doesn’t matter. The moment you show something to another person you are deemed to have “published” it, and if you haven’t got permission to use the material, you’d be breaking the law at that point.

[Andrew Rendell]

It kind of depends on how much footage you need to send and what the implications of spending a long time on uploading via the internet are to you.

I’ve just had to get the rushes from a 3 day shoot abroad back quickly. It turned out to be about 160GB and knowing that it would be quite large we looked at the alternatives and the quickest way was for someone to fly with it on a drive. It would have been cheaper to use, say, FTP, but we decided that with a dealine looming we couldn’t take the chance on the speed and reliability of internet connections from China for that amount of media.

[Andrew Rendell]

It could be that you’re misreading the edl. The convention for edl’s is that the IN point is the first frame recorded on the “master tape” and the OUT point is the first frame not recorded, so each edit will have the same number in the OUT point as the IN point for the next edit.

[Andrew Rendell]

I haven’t tried the PIX240, but I have been using material shot using a NanoFlash. Pictures are very good on the nanoflash, but we’ve been using it piggy-backed on a Sony EX3 and the one problem we’ve had is that using the NanoFlash in this way means using the EX3’s microphone inputs, which are, er, let’s just say, not quite ideal (limiters which kick in too early and can’t be turned off plus a sound level display which is very hard to judge levels on). YMMV. Having it’s own mic inputs might make the PIX240 a better bet in that way, so I’m quite interested myself…

[Andrew Rendell]

Audio for video is always at 48kHz, not the CD standard of 44.1kHz so although you can edit with a 44.1kHz audio track at some point it will have to be converted to 48kHz if you want to play out to a video format.

I would advise converting your source track to a 48kHz 16 bit aiff using something like Compressor with the quality setting at the highest available. If the track is already at 24 bit, you can keep it at that, but there’s no advantage to increasing the bit rate unless you’re going to do more work on it.