Colour bars for broadcast

DK · Post by DK » Wed Jun 20, 2007 7:49 am

Hi.
Here's a technical question that has just been put to me.
Are you required to put colour bars on animation before sending it to a station for broadcast?
If so, how and why.
I know the colour bars are used to calibrate a video signal and are usually generated by a camera but what about for animation?

Regards
D.K

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:28 am

Your animation is just a video signal when it's on tape. So put the colour bars at the beginning. Most video editing software generates it for you.

In general, read the requirements of your broadcaster before you prepare stuff for them.

DK · Post by DK » Wed Jun 20, 2007 9:47 am

Thanks Slowtiger. I just got an answer to this from one of the stations techs as well. I must supply the animation in a DVD format and then they make a copy of it to digital SP Beta tape. Apparently this is when the colour bars are put onto the tape. All I need to do is make sure the colours are broadcast safe.

Cheers
D.K

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 11:00 am

DVD to Beta SP? That's not exactly the way to get best quality.

My post-production facility (round the corner) accepts any digital format, Quicktime, AVI, on any material disk system (CD, DVD, Harddrive, Mini-DV) as source for transferring to tape. This way I can use uncompressed QT to maintain best quality. Encoding stuff for a player-DVD compromises quality a lot. Maybe you should ask again for details, as in common language "DVD" means the physical disc as well as the file formats and codecs on it.

I should note that details like this may not apply to your material. It always depends on the amount of detail and the range of colours if any difference in quality is visible at all.

DK · Post by DK » Wed Jun 20, 2007 11:10 am

The way it works here is everything must be submitted to the broadcast stations on digital SP beta tape. On top of this I have had a constant battle with several post facilities here who can't make up their mind what format they want. I always supply a Data DVD with an uncompressed .avi, a high quality .mov and a seperate DVD copy in standard mpg2 format. It's crazy but it's been that way for the last 5-6 years.

D.K