The Trouble with Dalets

Hi, guys [said in a flat Ted Baxter voice].

Long time, no see.

I know if you're having trouble with Dalets, you should be talking to "The Doctor," but I'm talking about the Dalet Corporation of Media Management fame.

[www.dalet.com]

Turns out Fox Broadcasting has or is putting in a Dalet Media Management System and it doesn't get along at all well with the Final Cut 7 suites. The specific complaint is time code scrambling. Fox is a 720P shop. No interlace anywhere. I'm foggy about the rest of the specifications, but that may be the important one. There is no Field One.

Say a producer wants to produce a video piece for later inclusion in the network stream. And so they do and ship it and the time code off to the Dalet. The Dalet says "Exterminate!" and promptly masticates the time code. This is the Reader's Digest version. I have no details, but I know the show is unusable when it comes back.

Of course, Dalet is pointing fingers at Final Cut and Fox would be pointing fingers at Dalet if they had any idea what was failing. It's that Venn Diagram thing. Dalet is OK in the World and Fox/Final Cut is OK in the world, it's only when they get together in that little overlapping portion.

In order to make this as difficult as possible, I'm not the editor, but I'm talking to the God of Engineering who is talking to a manager who, presumably, is talking to the editors. I'm pushing for an abbreviated pathway, so we don't play "Telephone" forever.

Dalet is a European company, but they have experiences and installations in the US, so our wack-job frame rates and time codes are not a shock to them -- we assume.

Koz

720p? That would traditionally mean 720p50 or p60. That's 50/60 fps. THAT will mess up timecodes. If you are going out to 720p50/69, you need to create a 720p master with 50/60 fps timecode.



www.strypesinpost.com

The Fox-11 broadcast stream is listed as 1280x720 59.94fps, so yes, they're right in the middle of that.

I know it's bare-bones information, but I can find out more.

So I understand, create a project at that framerate and import or convert all the assets to it. I wonder if that's what they're doing and the management system is "assuming" some other standard. I can check.

Thanks,
Koz

It's scary to think that there is no good SMPTE timecode standard for 720p59.94. I don't think I've ever seen one, but there must be, right? that's a broadcast standard. Back to the file cabinet. Koz

I'm not sure exactly what is going on at your network, but I know that you cannot do an edit in 1080i60, export an xml, and batch capture or re-link from a 720p60 source.



www.strypesinpost.com

...and it's "Daleks" when referring to "The Doctor"



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.