You may have seen that we’ve recently added some new tricks to the box.

In days of yore, TV commercials in the UK were submitted on 1/2″ tape to the clearing house, who’d check the content of your ad to make sure it didn’t break any laws.  You’d then send it off to whoever was dealing with broadcast for you and the edit would be subjected to a series of tests to ensure that the video was within stringent broadcast standards. If you’d distorted some audio or your whites were a bit too bright, the tape would be rejected and you’d be faced with another mammoth round trip.

Fortunately, some lovely people have got together in the past few years and created digital means of submission.  Both the clearance service (in the UK this is Clearcast) and the companies who serve the ads direct to the broadcasters (IMD are one) can now accept ads submitted online.For the quality to be broadcastable, you obviously can’t employ the same compression the guys at YouTube use.  The requirement is for 50Mbps MPEG2 video comprised entirely of I frames - which is to say that the compression encodes every single frame individually, rather than trying to guess at the changes in between key frames.

This format is not easy to encode to with standard tools, which is why when the need arose we plumped for the utterly brilliant Episode Pro which has taken on all encoding duties across the facility.  It’s fast - optimised for our multi-processor Intel Macs - and highly configurable, which is a great boon when involved with the black art of tweaking compressed files for the best quality for the smallest file size.

Not only is the software easy to use, it produces beautiful output - and the first ad we submitted with the system went through its technical checks with flying colours.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 7:33 pm and is filed under broadcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.