Re: Ripping a dvd for FCPX editing

Michael:

Every station has differing requirements. You'll want to call their traffic department or the engineer's office to get the specs, because I find the sales guys at stations usually don't know this stuff.

If you have real scopes, use them as you do your edit. Otherwise, use the virtual scopes that come with FCP to monitor video levels. You can try to cheat and use the broadcast safe filter, but that's not always good enough. Audio wise, the requirements vary as well, I usually keep my peaks at minus 12 Db and that seems to work locally. You must check with the station to see what they want, and if they want steero, mono, surround, closed captions, etc.

You will want to try and send the finished spot using FTP upload directly to the station, or to a service that mass-distributes spots to stations like DGit.com or pathfire. Those places will usually accept a file burned to a DVD data disk or blu-ray disk, (typically an mov h.264 file) as well as tape, and they will then do any further conversion for you, but usually someone has to pay for that, and, most editors prefer to have more direct control over their product than to hand it off to others to change levels, etc.

Be ready for a few rejections at first, until you figure it all out.