So I have this upcoming contract to film an event. The director asks me to supply a USB, and knows nothing else. So I figure I'll give him a mp4 file (it's 30 minutes). he will pass it to the TV station for airing.
Here's my question....Which mp4 do I use? (Sony, Mainconcept..) and what bitrate is safe (16,000,000)?? It will be 1920x1080
Thanks
You need to find out what format the station needs. Do not guess or assume. Contact their engineering or sales department and get the exact specs. If it is a 30 minute show, it will probably also need to be closed captioned.
if you're simply shooting it doesn't really matter as long as the producer is willing to accept your cameras codec, eg, mp4
but if you're doing ANY post at all then donaldt above is spot on check with the station BEFORE doing anything.
You need to ask which specific coding system they use. Don't guess. You don't want to get in trouble minutes before the broadcast. Most TV broadcasters use an intermediate company that transcodes their material. Call them. Here in Europe usually .MXF MPEG HD422 is used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDCAM.
As long as you shoot in their requested native resolution at high bitrate you should be able to transcode it to their requested format without much quality loss. 50Mbit/s (CBR) is usally expected. Beside asking them the format let them specify everything in detail audio and video, frame rate, bitrate, audio channels, audio bit rate, bit depth (24?).
Stations usually have specification hand books for this purpose.
What is their saturation/gamma limit? Also don't forget to ask which loudness standard they expect to be used.
I have often produced and rendered footages or broadcasting here in Europe .MXF MPEG HD422 has 8 channels of audio! (other channels are used for extra feeds, like surround sound etc) Usually only two of those channels contain audio. But the 8 channels MUST be present and rendered when rendering from Vegas. Vegas proviedes an option for this when rendering. If you need to know more then I can post more info about that.
VMP
Most TV broadcasters use an intermediate company that transcodes their material. Call them. Here in Europe usually .MXF MPEG HD422 is used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDCAM.
As long as you shoot in their requested native resolution at high bitrate you should be able to transcode it to their requested format without much quality loss. 50Mbit/s (CBR) is usally expected.
+1
We send Sony MXF HD422 50Mbps to PBS all the time. If that's not the format that the TV station wants, it has plenty of quality to be transcoded into the format that they do want without any visual loss so I would stick with XDCAM.
~jr
Just to add to the lart post, what is acceptable to PBS is almost universally accepted by informed broafcasters. PBS is kind of a gold standard for best practices, although their EBU R128 and ATSC A85 audio compliance is rather lacking at the local level.
Many broadcasters won't accept h264 in an mp4 container, although it is easily changed to mov