Creating TV commercials that are NTSC "Title Safe"
Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 6:00 pm
Hi everybody.
I'm new here, but I'm glad I found this place. I'm not an animator, but I bought Anime Studio 7 Pro a few months ago to try to create TV commercials for my company. The online tutorials all seemed to be way outside my element because they all seemed to assume you were already familiar with animation lingo and with the older versions of AS. Thankfully every time I looked for information about something I didn't understand, I landed here in your forums... and I learned quite a bit! Thanks guys!
Anyhow, after a few weeks I finally put together an actual commercial that I was happy with... so I submitted it to Google to start bidding on cable TV stations. To me, the commercial was pretty slick. The trouble is it was rejected because it didn't meet their "Technical" requirements.
Google is very strict about cable TV ads. For example, they have to have 29.97 frames per second, and your commercial cannot be even one frame more or less. The audio has to be 48 Khz, the resolution has to be 720x480, etc. This was a big letdown for me because my original commercial was a beautiful 1920x1080 widescreen spot with lots of room for everything. I tried to letterbox it to fit their 720x480 limit and it was rejected too.
Problem # 1 - Audio Sample Rate of 48K
I can see how I can change the frame rate, and the resolution, but I can't seem to see any way to change the audio to adjust the audio sample rate to 48 khz instead of 44.1.
Problem #2 - Frame Rate transcribing 24 to 29.97
When I started the commercial, I left the default 24 frames per second, then when it was rejected, I tried to change it to 29.97, but the problem is all my timing with my audio went out of sync because I was pacing it to go along with my narration. I tried to change it to 29.97 in the export phase, but it still rendered it as 24fps.
Next time I know I should create a project in 29.97 to start with, but is there an easy way to convert my old commercial to 29.97 without moving each keyframe?
Problem # 3 - making it "Title Safe"
This was the biggest hurdle for me. As I mentioned, I moved my titles inward quite a bit from the original 1920x1080 to the more restricted 720x480, but they told me that my final output still wasn't "Title Safe". I had no idea what that meant, so I Googled around to find out that it means that the text and graphics are considered clear and readable on most TVs.
The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any clear way to know what I can do to make mine "safe". I made the fonts bigger, gave them shadows, moved them closer to the center, but they still rejected it.
The trouble with Google is, they are impossible to communicate with. They don't have phone numbers to call... and emails take days and all you get are canned messages. It's as if they don't even read anything you wrote.
Any tips would be great.
Here are the rejected commercials
Original Widescreen HD
HTSC 4:3 version
THANKS!
Joe
I'm new here, but I'm glad I found this place. I'm not an animator, but I bought Anime Studio 7 Pro a few months ago to try to create TV commercials for my company. The online tutorials all seemed to be way outside my element because they all seemed to assume you were already familiar with animation lingo and with the older versions of AS. Thankfully every time I looked for information about something I didn't understand, I landed here in your forums... and I learned quite a bit! Thanks guys!
Anyhow, after a few weeks I finally put together an actual commercial that I was happy with... so I submitted it to Google to start bidding on cable TV stations. To me, the commercial was pretty slick. The trouble is it was rejected because it didn't meet their "Technical" requirements.
Google is very strict about cable TV ads. For example, they have to have 29.97 frames per second, and your commercial cannot be even one frame more or less. The audio has to be 48 Khz, the resolution has to be 720x480, etc. This was a big letdown for me because my original commercial was a beautiful 1920x1080 widescreen spot with lots of room for everything. I tried to letterbox it to fit their 720x480 limit and it was rejected too.
Problem # 1 - Audio Sample Rate of 48K
I can see how I can change the frame rate, and the resolution, but I can't seem to see any way to change the audio to adjust the audio sample rate to 48 khz instead of 44.1.
Problem #2 - Frame Rate transcribing 24 to 29.97
When I started the commercial, I left the default 24 frames per second, then when it was rejected, I tried to change it to 29.97, but the problem is all my timing with my audio went out of sync because I was pacing it to go along with my narration. I tried to change it to 29.97 in the export phase, but it still rendered it as 24fps.
Next time I know I should create a project in 29.97 to start with, but is there an easy way to convert my old commercial to 29.97 without moving each keyframe?
Problem # 3 - making it "Title Safe"
This was the biggest hurdle for me. As I mentioned, I moved my titles inward quite a bit from the original 1920x1080 to the more restricted 720x480, but they told me that my final output still wasn't "Title Safe". I had no idea what that meant, so I Googled around to find out that it means that the text and graphics are considered clear and readable on most TVs.
The trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any clear way to know what I can do to make mine "safe". I made the fonts bigger, gave them shadows, moved them closer to the center, but they still rejected it.
The trouble with Google is, they are impossible to communicate with. They don't have phone numbers to call... and emails take days and all you get are canned messages. It's as if they don't even read anything you wrote.
Any tips would be great.
Here are the rejected commercials
Original Widescreen HD
HTSC 4:3 version
THANKS!
Joe