Exactly my question - How the heck do they know what you shot on? Can they spot a poorly shot film with a weaker camera and crappier lenses with the correct codec, as opposed to a well shot film with sharp lenses but the EX SxS 4:2:0 codec - and then reject the latter?


I was at a talk on HD tapeless workflow at the BBC yesterday. Seemly they have a spectrum analyser which all the delivered programmes are put through. Problems are not just caused by the camera codec, but how the post workflow itself is handled.

Apparently, about 60% of delivered programmes have an issue of some sort. The reasons vary from not having the right paperwork to needing to re-shoot material because they used the wrong codec for more than 25% of the programme or post workflow issues. Any variation from the 25% needs to be discussed and to be justified eg the use of archival material.

That's how it stands for HD at the present time. Perhaps they may reduce the quality standards in the future, but the impression was they weren't going to let these standards slip..

Seemly they have a spectrum analyser which all the delivered programmes are put through. Problems are not just caused by the camera codec, but how the post workflow itself is handled.

I'd like to hear more about this...in this context, "spectrum analyzer" is a pretty unscientific term. Not saying I don't believe you, just wary of that term.

I've had a lot of my deliverables go through an outfit in Burbank called DVS, which does QC, encoding and vaulting for a lot of content producers, and the reports I've seen (i.e., the jobs that got rejected) are definitely machine generated with a human running it (human written notes in the comments beside each line item violation).

But nothing that sounded like "spectrum analyzer" that could somehow divine what codecs were used before a master was made.

That's the term the BBC guru used. I suspect it's a similar device to the one that I linked to earlier in the thread.

http://www.cnrood.com/PHP/files/video_pdf/Tektronix-PQA500.pdf

There was a mixed range of people at the talk, so I guess it was just a catch all term for a piece of test equipment. They sounded confident about being able to spot non spec video content, which may or may not be the case 100% of the time in practise. Certainly, he said HD programmes have been failed. It could be also be due to issues somewhere else in the chain, because post workflow was also mentioned in connection to this.

Of course, it could just be a virtual transmission chain that pushes the master to the limits, so that the compression errors in the workflow start to show up.