I received the following statement for video submission requirements to a cable TV network for submission to their FTP site. My question is in reference to the 4:2:2 statement. Are they referring to the color sampleing rate of the camera or the MPEG-2 output of my editor? My camera is 4:1:1 color sampleing.


Their requirements are:

"The preferred format for MPEG-2 is 4:2:2 (MP@ML) with a bit rate of 15-18Mbps, full resolution 720x480. Video levels should be no higher than 100IRE and Audio no higher than +2db."

PLUS 2dB???? 2dB over what?

That is sort of silly to require 4:2:2 color. If they are talking about the camera acquiring 4:2:2, they eliminate a heck of a lot of great cameras. If they are only talking about file format (not acquisition), that is even sillier, because it's difficult to imagine that they broadcast 4:2:2 MPEG2 streams on their cable, so they would just be downsampling what you are upsampling.