Ask The Expert: Preparing a Project for Professional (International) Distribution?
The following question was posed on the Cassie Tips List last evening - there may be others more qualified to comment on this, but I was intrigued by the delivery specs and did a little research, my learning and comments/suggestions are posted below in the 'ANSWER'
QUESTION: I've been shooting & cutting away, creating 5 min films for a
University's online channel for some time now. Suddenly I'm told that a
major TV station wants to acquire 10 of them for broadcast and to re
distribute overseas including to USA. Great, but I didn't edit the short
films with this in mind !
They are asking the delivery specs for FCP (Apple/Macintosh - Final Cut Pro). But with my adorable Cassie
as we know, it's quite a different system, has any one got any good
ideas to meet this delivery requirement ?- Digital Betacam In stereo.
Full mix (tracks 1 & 2.) M & E (tracks 3 & 4) and textless
elements at the end of the tape.
So far all I can come up with would be to mute, and export selected
audio tracks to CD & recreate a new master on a different system
then output to Betacam. Or can I do this through my Cassie then export to Betacam. I'd like to show people that a Cassie CAN deliver the goods. But I think the Cassie only renders all tracks into one, hmm.
With our later software versions inc V4, we now have the ability to copy
a project to another free project space keeping the original intact.
I could then mute all but one at the time ?
ANSWER: You may know this, but I learned some things here and thought there may be other list members who would like to learn this
- Since their requested format is Digital Betacam, those decks appear to have 3 video input options: Analog Composite Video, Analog Component Video, SDI Video and HD-SDI. The only signal natively coming out of our Casablanca is the analog composite video signal (which you would need to easily adapt from RCA/Phono into a BNC connector). And your Full mix (audio Left and Right tracks) from your storyboard would be recorded onto tracks 1 & 2 of the Digital Betacam master.
The M & E (Music & Effects) is essentially the music and any sound effects, nat. sound (ambient audio) without any narration. I read that distributors require this in case they wish to take your video to international distribution and need/desire to add narration or dialog in a different language. You could obtain this be muting your narration/dialog track/s in the Audio Mix menu, make a scene of your entire project, use Scene>Sample and then export that to audio CD for the post house to record onto Tracks 3&4 to satisfy the M & E requirement.
And lastly the ' textless elements at the end of the tape' as I learned was any scene that you added titles to in the production. This would be the base scene/s by themselves, added at the end of the project to allow the distributor to add titles in a different language if they needed to. I learned that the request to add this on the end of the tape is to keep the content together, instead of it being on a separate tape which requires greater logistics & management of the pieces of the project.
Anyway - that's a lot of extra work, but if it's made worth your while... it's a do-able task. Thanks for creating a mystery for me that led to some learning this morning :)
Tips & Tutorials by the Casablanca Expert, Chet Davis
www.CasablancaExpert.com
