So you want to be on TV? Increasing numbers of developers are bridging the gap between Flash and broadcasting. Why? In many cases, developers have existing material designed in Flash and they are looking for one more way to get it out there. Maybe they want to create a demo reel of their work, or create a TV spot for a Flash-based website. In other cases, animators might choose to use Flash for its animation features - especially if their material lends itself to a vector-based approach.

David Colquhoun and I spoke about our experiences in making the move from Flash to film and video at FlashForward2001. Even though our projects were very different there were a lot of common issues which we both had to tackle. In this article I'm going to outline these challenges and focus specifically on video.

The Intimidation Factor

"Will you be wanting gravy or drop-frame timecode with that?"

The world of broadcasting is laden with its own terminology. You'll find post-production engineers who will happily talk circles around you for days. Your best trick is to do your research, ask questions and try not to look too confused. You'll also discover some pretty hefty price tags when you enter the world of professional broadcast production. It's pretty easy to spend $1000/hr on an edit suite and an engineer. You'll get free coffee and fresh fruit but at those kind of rates you'll want to make sure that you have everything lined up before you step foot in the door.

The Strategy

Let's look at the overall process for a moment. The first stage takes place in Flash where you prepare and export your work. Typically you will be exporting the work as QuickTime Video or a series of high-quality stills (PNG, TIF or possibly EPS). Then you'll move over to an editing package - such as Avid, AfterEffects or FinalCut Pro. This is where your final tweaking takes place. The last step is to transfer your finished work to tape.

The Design

First off, let me say that expectations in broadcast are much higher than they are on the web. If you took some of the best web animation and dumped it onto a video tape it would not stand up very well in your typical Saturday morning time slot. As Flash designers we have learned to work around a lot of limitations in the online world which just aren't there when we move to video. As a result there are some processes that we have to 'unlearn'.

Aspect ratio and Sizing

Your size is fixed when working to video. For NTSC work you'll need to work with a 4:3 ratio (width:height). Remember that the output dimensions can be easily scaled if you are working strictly with vectors. Most editing packages like to work at a particular resolution - 640x480 being a very common size. Other work at the D1 resolution used on DigiBeta systems- 720x540.

Movie Clips

Movie clips simply don't work when you export as QuickTime or stills. There is only one timeline in the oh-so-linear video world. Your best bet is to change the instance behavior from movie clip to graphic. Graphic instances move in step with their parent timelines and will work fine when you reach the export stage. If this proves to be too much work your other option is to bypass the export stage and instead record directly from your computer to tape -- in which case you'll want to make sure your hardware is up to the task.

Frame Rates

In Flash we're stuck with a 'suggested' frame rate. The actual playback depends on the complexity of our work and the speed of the machine it is being viewed on. For film and video the frame rates are fixed:

NTSC Video: 29.97fps
PAL Video: 25fps
Film: 24fps

You have a few options in choosing what frame rate to use in Flash. For NTSC video, for example, you are often best off working at 30fps. If you expect to be extending and shortening video segments at the compositing stage you'll want to have extra frames in there to retain the quality so use a frame rate of 60fps or even 120fps.

Colors

Not that anyone cares any more but forget about your web-safe color palette. It has no place in TV or film. Television formats do have a range of 'broadcast safe' colors and you'll want to watch out for that. Most editing packages provide built-in methods to test for out-of-range colors. Use them. It's often necessary to desaturate bright colors, especially reds to prevent them from bleeding all over the place. Another issue that you'll have to cope with is color matching. Colors rarely display exactly the same way given the range of televisions out there. Get it as close as you can and hope for the best.

Resolution & Display Quality

Televisions are nowhere near the quality of your typical computer display. They have pretty limited resolution, they use interlacing, and suffer from poor contrast. What does this mean? Well, forget about single pixel lines, especially horizontal ones, they can easily get lost or flicker as a result of the interlacing. Also, if you want your text to be readable use big bold fonts. No tiny pixel fonts or thin-lined serif fonts.

Cropping

No two TV sets crop the image in just the same way. But you can be certain some cropping will always take place. In the video world you'll hear about 'action safe' and 'title safe' regions. The action safe region refers to the typical cutoff of most TV sets. If you want to be certain something is clearly visible and not distorted or skewed keep it within the title safe area.

File sizes

If you're like me, you have an innate need to keep file sizes down. This is one restriction which is removed when working for video. You can happily spit out 200Mb QuickTime files as long as you have the capacity to handle them on your hardware. Keep in mind these things get big. Uncompressed NTSC video is roughly 30Mb/second so a two minute chunk of video weighs in at around 3.6Gb. As you can imagine you can run into some practical limitations when working with files this size. Moving them around and backing them up becomes problematic so make sure you have the hardware to handle it.

Transfer

Moving your work from your machine to the final format is a critical stage in the process. You have a choice - do a compressed transfer using a format such as DV or do an uncompressed transfer. When your design involves lots of areas of flat colors and high contrast you'll want to try and avoid any sort of compression. This type of imagery is particularly susceptible to compression artifacts. The catch with doing an uncompressed transfer is that it requires specialized hardware to do it. Remember that 30Mb/second figure? Few desktop computers can reliably pump out that kind of data rate. Your best bet is to take your work to a post-production house and have them do it for you.

If you can't afford that or you can live with the quality loss then consider using the DV format. At 3.6Mb/second DV can be reliably juggled on a good desktop machine and can be transferred to a deck over Firewire.

Audio

Your use of audio is one area where the quality expectations for broadcast video are much higher. It makes sense to treat the audio and video separately and combine them at the transfer stage. If you need to worry about syncing, use a lower-quality placeholder audio in Flash and then swap it out at the end. Keep your audio in an uncompressed format using a 44.1Khz sampling rate or higher.

Details

If your work is going to end up in the hands of a television broadcaster you'll want to be sure you're giving them what they want. These days, you'll most likely be handing them a first-generation BetaCam tape or a DigiBeta tape. They may expect to see timecode, color bars and tone. Again, this is where your friends in the post-production world will help. Let them know where your tape is ending up and check with the broadcaster in terms of expected formats.

Press Play

One of the best things about Flash is that it sits at the intersection of so many media and disciplines. One day you might be talking to musicians and then next you're talking to network engineers or post-production gurus. I've discussed some of the advantages of working with video but don't forget the single greatest one - practically everyone has a television set and knows how to use it. No plug-ins, no PPP connections. Slip in a tape and press play. Joy!

Links:

If you're looking for more details on terminology I highly recommend the Flash to Video FAQ from the folks at Flickerlab.