[T. Payton]

Graeme,

I got your demo. Seems like your conversion times are much shorter than Compressor. I’ve got a bit more time (half a day on Monday). So I will dive into it then.

Thanks for your help guys.

T .

T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque, NM

[T. Payton]

[Frank Nolan] “I am not sure if you and I are reading the same post but there was no mention of anamorphic or needing to down convert. DVCPro50 is SD with 720×480 lines. So it is very close to digibeta which is 720×486.
“

Note to self. Don’t reply to CreativeCow post when you’re home sick surfing the net and should be in bed.

🙂

My bad. In that case you are much better off going to a post house with FCP capability.

– T.

[T. Payton]

[Frank Nolan] “Take a DVCPro50 timeline, compress it to M-peg2 for DVD then lay that to a Digibeta or BetaSP, which will then more than likely be compressed to m-peg2 again for transmission? That will surely look horrible.”

I actually think most of the MPEG2 artifacts will be reduced greatly becuase of the downconversion that a DVD player would be doing. You going from a MPEG 2, 720×480 Anamorphic, to the effective letterboxed SD resolution of about 640×358 that will be layed down to beta. This size reduction in combination of the “softening” with the analog component connections from the DVD player should make the Beta dub look quite nice and free of artifacts.

Although MPEG2 is a lossy process and looks horrible on paper (4:2:0, ouch!) in application and when treated properly can look very good.

– T.

T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque, NM

[T. Payton]

I would recommend you contact the station and speak with someone in master control or traffic in regards to which format they can take. If they can only take SD insertions (which is probably the case) Beta SP and Digibeta are THE standards in the industry, but they might be open to taking others (DVD for example). if Beta and DigiBeta is all they take then contact a local post house that has a FCP system and have them dub it to Beta or DigiBeta from your original files. If a local post house doesn’t have FCP, you could try making a DVD with the highest quality settings (use compressor 60 minute high quality widescreen) and they can make a dub from that to Beta or DigiBeta.

If by some miracle, the cable folks can take a HD insertion, and you don’t have a local post house that can do this, try Digital film tree at https://www.digitalfilmtree.com/. They are a FCP shop in LA and can make a pristine dub of your 720p edit (from a Hard Drive or DVD-Rom) to HD or SD format that your station will need.

BTW, in all likelihood when you sent over a DV formated spot, they brought that into their NLE and made a Beta Dub from the NLE. If they are on an Avid (likely) they had a heck of a time converting your DV file to something playable. So the fact that your DV dub looks poor when aired is probably in their attempt to deal with your DV files. DV is not a horrid format. 9 times out of 10 I make a MiniDV copy of a spot and have my post house make Beta dubs from that. As long as you ensure that you are happy with the qualtity of your Beta dub that your giving the stations, you should be fine.

T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque, NM