Final Cut Pro HD | H•O•T Hands-On Training [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Pre-Program Material

HOWEVER… if you are planning to take your tape to duplication, broadcast, a trade show, or archiving, there are a few more steps you should complete before pressing the Record button on your tape deck or camera.

When I use Print to Video, these are the settings I use. Let's take a look at what they do and why you should use them.

In the top half of the screen are the controls for pre-program, or Leader, material. For a long, long time, standard industry practice has organized the beginning of a tape as follows:

60 seconds of color bars

10 seconds of black

10 seconds of slate (keep reading, I'll explain it shortly)

10 seconds of black

Program start

Color bars display an engineering test signal that allows a tape to be configured on playback so that the colors it plays back match the colors you recorded when you output your sequence. Recording 60 seconds of color bars allows an engineer sufficient time to properly set up your tape. Color bars have been used in broadcasting for decades. There's a good reason. Without them, there's no guarantee that the colors that play back from your tape will match the colors you recorded.

In the days of live television and playback from tape decks, the last 10 seconds of black were replaced by a countdown. These days, with everything playing back instantly from servers, countdowns are no longer necessary. (Sigh… I miss them.)

Along with color bars (called "bars" by those "in the know") goes tone. Tone is a 1000-cycle tone set at a fixed reference volume level. These reference levels are standardized by tape format, so that an engineer can set the tone at the proper level for playback. The default output level for tone in Final Cut is 12 dB.

Slate identifies your program. At a minimum, it should include a title and a running time (abbreviated TRT, for Total Running Time). Most professional slates also include the name of the client/producer/director, the date the show was finished, and anything else relevant from an engineering point of view.

To create a slate, change the pop-up menu next to Slate to Text and type your information in the small text window on the right. Use hyphens (-) when you want to put a space between lines.

Running time is the length your show runs from fade up to fade down, excluding any commercial breaks. The Duration Calculator in the lower-right corner of this dialog helps give you the answer. The top line shows actual program running time (30 seconds in the case of this commercial); the second line shows total running time including all the pre-program material, 1:40:02, in this example.

One other neat goodie is the Media section. Many times, when I create materials for trade shows, the client wants it to repeat over and over… and over. Using these check boxes means I only need to create the sequence once, and Final Cut will automatically play it back on output as many times (Loop) and with as many seconds of black between each repetition (Black) as I want. I've used this often and it works great.