Re: How can I improve compression settings for digital delivery?

Our facility does digital delivery every day. For HD spots, the standard bit rate for encoding is 50MPBS - 5 times higher than the 10MBPS you are doing. Bitrates in these levels ares known as "high profile" encoding and you'll need to determine if your version of Main Concept is capable of doing that.
Key frames in terms of compression is how often the compressor will contain all the data of a frame - the frames in between will be calculated by compression that analyzes differences or lack thereof in movement between frames, redundancy and differentiation between frames as far as pixel information - luminance/chrominance, and many other things.
Thus, keyframing every 300 frames is a very low rate. Try keyframing between every 20-30 frames and see how it looks. Many people default to keyframing every 24 frames of set the compressor to automatic which will do its own determination based on the content of the video.
Keep in mind though that whatever you submit to a TV station be it video file or tape will most likely get ingested into their system in some way which will incur another level of compression for their specific needs and storage capabilities. As you said, do your best to contact them and find out exactly what their delivery specs are and don't be shocked when every station tells you something different even if they are in the same building. That's how it is.

Chad Brewer
Senior Tape Operator/Engineer
TeleVersions