[Victor Angry]

Google for “photofreebies”. There is a filter called “remove transparency” which will take every pixel in your layer/selection and make it fully opaque.

You could also use Telegraphics Filter Foundry (also free) and just use “a=255” as your script.

If you’re on Mac you’ll have to go the FF route as photofreebies as compiled for Windows only.

[Victor Angry]

Just a couple notes from a moderately experienced Master Control guy after reading the thread…

Locally originated national spots come in on tape less and less…most of that stuff comes in on FastChannel or PathFire now, and when it does, your typical apathetic MC Op can just build his dublist and hit play without touching any of the audio or video level controls and have it look fine because the engineers (or the one MC Op that cares) already calibrated the box and the spot was setup and distributed with that system in mind.

Send them a tape and yeah, they usually leave all the levels in unity or leave them where they were from the last tape. What’s worse is when using those decks that have input gain controls for audio, but nothing for output, and feeding that into a server using ingest software that doesn’t even have audio gain controls (Crispin Dubber for example). Most of your operators won’t bother loading up a different ingest program with gain controls if one is even available, or do anything else to work around the problem. It doesn’t help when MC gets consolidated to somewhere other than where you’re sending your tape, and the spot ends up being microwaved or captured and networked to MC, having gone through yet another set of careless hands.

Unfortunately even the guys that know what they’re doing get jaded by the endless stream of poorly dubbed tapes that come in. If you’re sending tapes that are perfect or near perfect technically, you’re about the only one. Most of the time when I would set up a deck’s output by the bars on someone’s tape the spot would end up with blacks at -2 or 20, and have peak video around 108, so I’d have to ignore the bars and go through the spot just adjusting for broadcast legality. Then, as if to mock the MC Op, their would be 9 seconds of black between the 2 second mark on the countdown and the actual start of the spot. Of course that’s not much of an excuse…I’d still set for bars even though I knew it was often futile, and every once in a while someone who probably was using a real live hardware WFM would do things right and make life easier.

As far as spots looking good on the HD feed while looking bad on the SD, my only guess there is that spots are being captured outside of broadcast legal levels and they’re using a processor upstream of the analog transmitter to clamp/clip everything to broadcast legal, but that processing isn’t happening on the HD. I’m not sure if ATSC has headroom for superwhites though.

I don’t think there’s really much you can do from your position though. As long as their clients keep making buys these guys don’t have much incentive to improve their house infrastructure or crack down on careless spot ingestion. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and on a personal note, thanks for being one of the good guys.

[Victor Angry]

Got that beat. I’m 26 and edited on 1″, switched on an Ampex 4100, and aired spots off of Quad. Before you say that’s impossible…I started early and I’m in a tiny market. Now someone else can come along and talk about film chains 🙂

[Victor Angry]

Apply 12dB gain, nest clip, apply more gain to nested sequence.

[Victor Angry]

I do Master Control, I enter about 99% of our spots into the playback system, and I receive spots via FastChannel. I have not noticed any of the artifacts you describe on anything we get from FC. Of course I’m probably not seeing your specific spots in my market, and for the sake of your clients you’re probably not willing to say who they are, but I imagine if you were having problems others would be as well. I doubt you have much to worry about. BTW, I thought FC specified 18 Mbps, not 15.