[Chris Blair]

We’re considering H264 too, but one reason it wasn’t on my list is our marketing person wants to be able to take the same video files and put them on our company laptop and build playlists for presentations when he’s out of the office. When we’ve tested H264 files at full resolution and high quality (5-7Mb/sec and we’re using Carbon Coder which I believe uses MainConcept for H264), our 6 year old HP laptop has a hard time playing them without some hiccups here and there. The laptop plays all the others without issue.

Could be that is only has a 1.4Ghz processor, or that it’s in dire need of a hard drive reformat and fresh OS install. Which begs the question…why not get a new laptop? Well…budget reasons primarily. We’re spending several thousand on the conference room renovation and just trying to avoid buying unnecessary stuff.

On the VGA over DVI, most of the LCD TV’s in the 32″-37″ class that we’ve looked at have VGA inputs and not DVI…so the thought was to avoid an unnecessary A/D conversion since the LCD’s PC input is VGA. Frankly I was surprised that they all seem to have VGA inputs instead of DVI. Kind of odd.

Ultimately, we’d like to add a Blackmagic HDMI card and just play our native files (they’ll play with an AVI virtual codec that points to the video) out via HDMI. But again, just trying to get it working…then as budget allows, add the stuff that will improve quality.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

As usual…Bob cuts through the clutter and gets to the REAL answer. That’s exactly what you should do…but…you’re STILL going to need find out and help generate a LOT more information for that production company before they can even hope to provide an accurate bid.

Having done a couple of pilots (which weren’t picked up for production), budgeting for them is time-consuming, tedious and often a guessing game since there are so many variables and unknowns before anyone commits to going into production. But that’s EXACTLY why Bob’s suggestion is so “spot on.” A production company that’s already producing reality shows will be able to pull budgets and line items from their experience and be miles ahead of people that haven’t done them.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

That’s a tough question to pin down to more than a just a broad range without more specific and detailed information.

A half-hour network quality program can be produced for anywhere from $35,000 (extremely low) to $250,000 (or higher) per episode depending on a whole host of factors.

You also say “shoot a reality show.” I’m assuming you mean shoot it, edit it, create a graphic look, script intros, bumps, teasers (the things you see coming back from a break and going into a break or transitioning etc.)

My guess to ballpark something like this (considering there would be overseas travel) would be somewhere in between those two figures. But without a LOT more detailed information and at least some preliminary research on your part about the format, structure and content of the show, it would be impossible to give you a realistic figure.

Most “reality” shows are in fact very structured in that they follow a fairly specific format that breaks the show down into segments of roughly 4-6 minutes each (allowing for commercial breaks in between) that total anywhere from 21 to 23 minutes.

So, give us more info and people on here with more experience than me could probably give you a more narrow range.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

I had to laugh reading Bob’s post because the thing I keep saying over and over when we meet to discuss upgrading our conference room is: “I want to keep it as simple as possible but have the ability to access our network, the internet and play videos from our shared video storage without having cables run everywhere on the floor.”

What happens now is we have to build custom made DVDs that showcase specific industries or styles of videos. I’d like to be able to build playlists from media already on drives rather than have to spend the time making custom DVD’s every time a client from a particular industry comes in.

So I’ve preached the “keep it simple” mantra throughout. Another good thing, we’re cheapskates and we want to spend the least amount of money possible on this, but would like to stop having to crawl around on the floor and running 20′ of ethernet and power cabling to plug in laptops and speakers for skype sessions and the like.

We already have a Kramer 8×8 component router that we bought for our edit suites that ended up not getting used (that’s a whole other story), and the best offer we got for it on ebay was $300 (it was $1,800 from B&H Photo and has literally never been out of the box.

So other than getting a new 37″ LCD TV, a new conference table (the existing one is 14 year old rubberwood table bought from Pier 1) and some new chairs, the only thing we’re spending money on is some cabling and a couple a/v convertors, along with having some counters and shelving built to serve food and drinks. I want to keep it simple so anybody using it can intuitively figure out how to control whatever they need.

So I’m with you Bob. I’ve been in conference rooms where the A/V guys didn’t know how to use or switch or setup half the equipment in it. But I would like the ability to build a playlist of videos from a computer (likely MPEG2 TS files), then play and control them from our iPhones or a web browser. Amazingly, VLC will do all of that and it’s pretty darn easy to invoke once it’s configured on your computers and the iPhone. I was controlling VLC on two networked PCs from home last night with my iPhone, building playlists, pausing, playing, making it full-screen etc. Pretty darn cool. You can do the same thing from a remote computer via a web browser. So you can have VLC setup to play videos from a server, then control it from a laptop in the conference room, change the playlists etc.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Great suggestions…and we’re putting in a little alcove for food service, drinks and the like, although running water to this room isn’t an option budget wise.

We do use skype so that’s a great idea and hadn’t thought of controlling lighting from the table although we have discussed remote control of lighting either through a laptop, iPhone (yep, there’s an app for that) or handheld controller.

Thanks

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Thanks…that’s what I figured. Guess I should’ve waited a version or two to buy the Decklink HD Extreme!

We’ll just stick with component monitoring.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

We use MyNewsletterBuilder.com. They don’t have great templates but they have GREAT customer service. They also have an online layout program so you can build and layout your newsletter on their site, they’re incredibly affordable, and they offer the standard tracking that other services offer.

Our webhost also has a built in E-newsletter service that allows you to build and distribute e-newsletters all from within our website’s FTP. It’s also very capable and free, but we’d already bought a year worth of MyNewsLetterBuilder so we stuck with it.

We’ve also demo’d Mailchimp but found their online layout engine very buggy. Text and graphics won’t stay where you put them (things won’t stay centered and when we demo’d a year or so ago, the code it generated wasn’t as clean as MyNewsLetterBuilder).

I also demo’d Constant Contact and a couple others, and while MyNewsLetterbuilder.com’s site doesn’t initially appear as slick as the others, their customer service blew away the others. You can chat immediately with support people via instant message and whenver I’ve called I’ve gotten a live person almost immediately every time.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Todd,

Here are the settings we use for Comcast:

Width=720
Height=480
Aspect=4:3 (They don’t accept 16:9 as far as I know)
FrameRate=29.97
Color sampling=4:2:2 (Use 4:2:2 if you have that option. Otherwise just use the DVD spec of 4:2:0)

Fields=lower field first, which matches our NLE system
(this may differ depending on your editing system. I’d send them 2 tests with one using upper and the other lower. 24P video with pulldown also often causes problems so if you shoot/edit using that be sure to also send a test of a 24P based spot. You may need different presets for each. When we send 24P spots to some stations/cable systems, their encoders reverse the fields, so we have special presets that resize the video instead of cropping the top and bottom 3 lines. This effectively reverses the fields which makes the 24P video play smoothly)

Multiplexed Stream
(Video/Audio encoded in same file, sometimes called Program Stream I believe)

PFrames=2 BFrames=2 (We just use the defaults on this coming out of our NLE system, which comes from a DVD compliant MPEG2 preset)

Variable Video Bitrate (VBR)
VideoMaxBitrate=20Mb/sec
VideoMaxAvgBitrate=18Mb/sec
VideoMinAvgBitrate=15Mb/sec

AudioBitrate=224
(MPEG Layer2, AC3 or linear PCM, basically anything supported within DVD specs. AC3 generates smaller sizes at no real loss in quality)

CloseGOP=3
Audio BitsPerSample=16
SamplesPerSec=48000khz
Channels=2 stereo

If you include a 2 seconds bars/tone, 2 seconds of a slate and a second of black before and after the spot, this usually generates a file about 60-75MB in size depending on the visual content. If there’s a lot of white (or black) space, the files are smaller. If there’s a lot of detail and motion, the files are bigger.

If you use 4:2:2 sampling, your files will be bigger since there’s more color info, but your quality will be a little higher. But the 4:2:0 encoded files look pretty darn good at the data rates above.

You can also use constant bitrate (CBR) at about 10-12Mb/sec and the resulting files are about the same size, but we’ve never seen any significant visual difference in quality doing that.

Hope that helps.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

I fear broadcasters here in the U.S. aren’t quite as savvy as our friends from across the pond. We have a spreadsheet we have to keep that lists the dizzying array of file formats and settings local network affiliates and cable companies require.

Many take MPEG2, some require various flavors of Quicktime, some require really specific containers and codecs (one has to have a specific Matrox AVI codec).

Once delivered, many (if not all) of them re-encode your already heavily compressed spots, and the results can be frightening. We send test after test and still see our spots run with fields reversed, color space screwed up, squished vertically or stretched horizontally, and with so much compression you can’t read large block text based graphics.

There are some that are so bad, we just gave up and resorted back to delivering tape based dubs and letting them encode them into their system.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Chris Blair]

Todd,

We output for Comcast in Nashville and Louisville. I’ll send you the specs from out output settings on our NLE system (VelocityQ).

We send them mpg2 files and the setting are really pretty basic, but I’m not at the office at the moment. When I get there later I’ll send them to you.

Where most of the TV stations and cable companies screw up digital deliveries is with field ordering, so if you work in progressive or have a way of deinterlacing interlaced projects and sending them progressive, I’d do it. Or, just send them a couple test spots with different field order and see which one they say works.

I’ll post later this evening with more specifics. Are you coming out of Premiere CS4 and Matrox Axio? Is that correct?

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com