[Andrew Rendell]

Just putting the 1080P footage into a 1080i sequence will make it output in PSF (Progressive Segmented Frame) where the lines will be split into field one and field two. That’s how progressive is usually handled. TBH, I don’t know anyone who has bothered trying to fake the time separation between field one and field two anyway.

You can transfer from 8 bit to 10 bit… you won’t get the full benefit of the 10 bit space but most broadcasters I deliver to will accept material originated in 8 bit at the moment.

[Andrew Rendell]

If it were possible to have high quality at low bit rates in an editable format we’d all be doing it all the time. My inclination for editable SD material at DVD quality would be to try the DV codec – but IIRC 2.5 hours would be something like 30GB…

[BTW, material on DVDs does bring up the nagging question at the back of the mind of where it came from… if the producer doesn’t have access to camera rushes or a broadcast quality master it does kinda beg the question: does he/she have the rights cleared to use it?
It’s not necessarily a problem (I’m actually using archive material off DVDs in my current job and what we choose will be ordered up from the library and replaced in the cut before the final online), it’s just something to be aware of.]

[Andrew Rendell]

Stereo, 48kHz 16 bit uncompressed (either wav or aif), levels to whatever is normal for tv broadcast in your territory (that varies from station to station so I’d suggest getting a specification from the kind of place you expect to take your film, if you have trouble there a reasonable rule of thumb is to go for peak levels of -10dBFS).

If you have commentary in your film, also make a “mix minus” version.

IN MY OPINION (others may disagree): A surround mix is up to you. It’s great to have but not everywhere can take it, you’ll probably need a stereo version as well because of the variety of outlets you’re looking at, so you might want to consider putting that off until you have a sale where you know it’s going to be heard (because it’s rather soul-destroying to go to the effort and expense of making something that no one gets to hear).

[Andrew Rendell]

Bill

That’s really good to know.

As you will realise from what I wrote, most of my work involves collaborating across platforms, so I’m more driven by being compatible with my clients (or their chosen facilities) than what I might prefer cutting with myself.

TBH, I can’t currently export directly in AS11+DPP and that’s one of the things where taking my project to my client’s system and doing the export there is so useful (apart from the convenience of being able to do tweaks at the final sign off stage on their kit rather than having to go back to mine if they need it).

[Andrew Rendell]

Is there anywhere near you where you can try headphones on ?

In my opinion if you’re going to wear headphones for long periods having a good comfortable fit is as important as the sound quality. E.g., the place where I’m working at the moment has Shure SRH840 headphones which I like for sound quality but I find them rather uncomfortable so I taking my Sony’s in.

I also like Audio Technica ATH-M50 and Sennheiser HD480 but I usually have to raid my daughter (media student & musician) to get those back.

TBH, if you can, I’d suggest checking a few reviews, e.g., https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan10/articles/studioheadphones.htm
and make a shortlist of the three or four that you think would suit you and then find somewhere to try them on.

[Andrew Rendell]

Today I finished a piece on my system, then took the drive to one system at my client’s place to open the project for final sign off and to play the broadcast version down the line to the broadcast facility which will transmit it tomorrow, then disconnected from that and plug my drive into another of my client’s systems to copy the web version onto their internal network (at the moment they do all the formatting and make up their web pages internally, I only supply the video in the editing codec).

You can only really do that kind of thing if your systems are standardized.

I know that a few people like FCPX, but I am led to understand that it’s still in a place where you need to add third party extras to make up a system that works for you in every workflow you need to use. TBH, I’d be very happy to be told that that’s no longer the case and one simple software install now does everything my client wants (I’ve read the occasional article but I haven’t really looked hard at it since last year).

[Andrew Rendell]

Short answer NO.
That amount of compression won’t be suitable for broadcast.

I’m delivering similar sized files to a broadcaster at the moment and we’ve tried a few things and basically it’s come back to me going in with a hard drive.

For sending big files over the internet, Aspera has been recommended to me, but I haven’t done enough with it to really comment about it yet myself.

[Andrew Rendell]

That’s a video from two years ago, when the debate was interesting (it was funny enough at the time, although I think the Hitler ones were better).

Unfortunately the debate hasn’t been the slightest bit interesting for a year and a half now. Now it’s very much “yeah, we know, just let us know when it does everything we need and we’ll give it another shot”.

[Andrew Rendell]

I wish you the best of luck. I would say though that even the big broadcasters are getting cameramen to multi-skill and record sound on location these days, consequently I spend more of my time than I care for trying to sweeten location sound where the peaks are bouncing off a limiter or there’s clipping ten decibels below 0dBFS or a few dB of gain brings background noise up to unacceptable levels. I had an ad-hoc “studio” shoot the other week, four cameras in a room + 4 mics recording to a separate recorder for a discussion show (presenter and 3 guests talking for about an hour and a quarter) and when we loaded all the media for post, NOTHING stayed in sync with anything else for more than a minute or two. And it was for a major broadcaster. So, quite frankly there’s room in London for people who really, properly understand the technical side of things… (things like not compromising on, for example, being sure that EVERY place where pictures and sound are processed/recorded are locked to the same syncs/timecode).

To be a bit more positive, things have gone around in cycles of cost cutting before and I sense that lots of time being wasted fixing stuff in post is starting to bring a few producers/production managers back to the knowledge that corner cutting on location is a false economy.

[Andrew Rendell]

Export from FCP in the same settings as the timeline, then convert it to whatever you’re going to deliver with something like Compressor – software which is made for the job will be much faster for doing the compression than FCP and have options that’ll improve the quality if you go into the settings menu(s).

Remember that in full quality editing we don’t pay too much attention to the size of the sound because it’s so much smaller than high quality video, but it does make a difference when things are highly compressed, so when working out what data rate to use it might be worth taking the audio data rate down as well as the pictures, perhaps as far as 96k (but do some tests and be critical over how it sounds – cruddy sound is worse for the audience’s experience than iffy picture quality).

Once you’ve worked out the data rate you need, do the compression with multi-pass selected. It takes longer than single pass (it can take twice as long or more) but the perceived quality at a given data rate is significantly better for most material.