Satellite broadcast looks bad help please
by jim Kinsey (Jim Kinsey)
on
Oct 14, 2008 at 12:14:24 am
Anyone who has a suggestion,
Hope this is the right forum... Anyway I have a show that airs on Direct tv each week and have noticed that the SD broadcast is really grainy and not as clean as the original show. All shows were shot on DV25 and output via firewire using QT conversion to DVCpro50 anamorphic. I send out the final movie file based to our closed captioning company then it goes to the network for Satellite broadcast. I am working in FCP and do not use a Kona card. I work in a 8 bit timeline Dv anamorphic. CAn someone tell me what I can do to improve the next 13 episodes. Thanks in advance.
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by Shane Ross on Oct 14, 2008 at 12:35:01 am
You can't do anything. The signal is compressed at the network for broadcast...there is nothing you can do about how they compress. All you can do is get them the best quality output you can.
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by jim Kinsey on Oct 14, 2008 at 12:37:57 am
Thanks. I have noticed other SD broadcasts that seem to be shot and edited in DV look cleaner. Quite a bit of the original footage was shot with a Canon XL2 anamorphic 30P ( frame mode ). Is there any reason that going to 480i would be any better?
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by Shane Ross on Oct 14, 2008 at 12:51:42 am
Got me. This all depends on how you deliver too. The other DV shows might deliver on digibeta, or be professionally color corrected, or many other variables.
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by jim Kinsey on Oct 14, 2008 at 1:02:15 am
I have been sending out our shows file based DVCPRo 50 anamorphic. Then the show get ingested into a FCP timeline and output SDI to beta sp I believe letter-boxed. The network gets it then encodes it to MPEG 2 for satellite distribution. We are just repurposing our SD footage as all our acquisition now is Solid state PANNY P2 and EX1 SXS. So no worries for our future stuff. So there is no other step I could take to make it any cleaner than outputting to digibeta?
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by david bogie on Oct 14, 2008 at 4:37:48 pm
[jim Kinsey]"I have been sending out our shows file based DVCPRo 50 anamorphic. "
That's one step away form the original, maybe two.
B>[jim Kinsey] Then the show get ingested into a FCP timeline and output SDI to beta sp I believe letter-boxed. "
You apply scaling and mattes for the letterbox, render, and transcode to SDI. that'stwo or four more steps way from the original, we're up to four, maybe generations of transcoding between diffrerent codecs.
B>[jim Kinsey] The network gets it then encodes it to MPEG 2 for satellite distribution. "
DOH!. All of the other steps have been wasted and all careful image control is now thrown away.
B>[jim Kinsey] We are just repurposing our SD footage as all our acquisition now is Solid state PANNY P2 and EX1 SXS. So no worries for our future stuff. So there is no other step I could take to make it any cleaner than outputting to digibeta?"
Certainly. Give them an MPEG2 file that you have scrupulously examined for encoding keyframes and to which you have applied many thousands of weensy adjustments for every scene change.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by walter biscardi on Oct 14, 2008 at 1:11:45 am
[jim Kinsey]"Anyway I have a show that airs on Direct tv each week and have noticed that the SD broadcast is really grainy and not as clean as the original show."
Of course it isn't. It's compressed by DirecTV for broadcast. Depending on what channel you are, it will be more or less compressed. I used to work for a corporate company that had a corporate channel on DirecTV and it was pretty clean on there, not perfect, but pretty clean.
You can only deliver the cleanest master you can make. Once it goes to broadcast, it's out of your hands.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by Ernie Santella on Oct 14, 2008 at 3:00:25 am
The satellite companies can use different compression on different channels. (You pay more, you get better quality) That could be part of the issue. Are you able to ask them what bit-rate they are encoding on your channel vs. other channels. (They may not tell you, they don't like to admit that)
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
www.santellaproductions.com
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by jim Kinsey on Oct 14, 2008 at 3:43:37 am
Thanks for all your input. I can now approach my partners and tell them we are doing everything right on our end but our broadcast in being super duper compressed. It is unfortunate for sure. I am excited at an all HD show sometime next year although still compressed it should look leaps and bounds better than SD.
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by Chuck Reti on Oct 14, 2008 at 4:21:04 am
Just curious to know if the output from the captioning facility matches your original- any video decoding/recoding artifacts in the process that might contribute?
Re: Satellite broadcast looks bad help please by jim Kinsey on Oct 14, 2008 at 2:48:42 pm
Good question. I will call today but as far as I know they take my file based DVCPRO 50 anamorphic QT file and ingest for SDI output to Beta SP. Thanks for your response.
