Posted by Toby on 08/21/07 17:11

"peter" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:Jpiyi.2402$wW6.2259@trnddc08...
>
> "Steve King" <steveSPAMBLOCK@stevekingSPAMBLOCK.net> wrote in message
> news:kLSdnUHNApwBOlTbnZ2dnUVZ_jydnZ2d@comcast.com...
>>
>> Well, picking up a phone and calling the station seems like a good idea
>> to me. They have the answers. The people who post here will only be
>> able to speculate on what this particular station is capable of doing and
>> is willing to do.
>
> Firstly, I don't want to sound too stupid and make totally unreasonable
> request from the station. E.g if the TV industry all standardized on Mac
> and I asked for an NTFS file, that would be unreasonable.
>
> Secondly, I am currently going through a middle man to contact the TV
> station. I have asked for a direct technical contact, but if I was denied
> that for some reason, I would have to make my request through the
> middleman. Therefore it is better to make a request that is likely to be
> honored, or at least sound reasonable.

Your mileage might vary, but when we get dubs from agencies or other
networks it is almost always on tape. The reason is that they can just dub
in real time by pushing a button or two, but turning it into a computer file
is generally a pain and takes a lot of extra work, unless they are set up to
do that, and I have never seen a station set up to do that, since there is
little use for avi files in broadcast workflow. If they've digitized it for
NLE it is probably in some format like Avid's OMFI, which is not going to do
you any good.

Admittedly I do not work with FCP or Premiere, and I don't know their file
formats. But in any case many stations still archive to tape, and delete
digitized NLE files as soon as a project is finished to save space, unless
they have a huge server.

And I am almost never welcome to drop by with my own equipment, as this
takes up space and some tech has to babysit me and repatch a lot of cables
to get a signal to me. And you will be in their face for three hours
minimum.

I would expect that they will offer you tape dubs on a choice of several
formats, and you will get to choose whichever suits you best. It seems
entirely reasonable that they should be able to offer you miniDV, but of
course all this is speculation based on my own experience.

Toby

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