View Single Post
Old 8th October 2019, 20:18   #18  |  Link
FranceBB
Broadcast Encoder
 
FranceBB's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, UK
Posts: 2,883
Quote:
Originally Posted by DJATOM View Post
is there are some channels airing in 4:2:2 chroma subsampling format? That's a news for me.
Professional feeds are always in 4:2:2 planar 10bit, however they are not for end users, they are for broadcasters everywhere in the world to receive the signal, decode it, do any kind of adjustment / comment then event and the re-encode it and air the event with their specifications.

For instance, the ATP Masters 1000 world feed which is shot and distributed across the whole world via Sat to all the licensors is in H.264 4:2:2 planar 10bit 25i, however once we get the signal, we make sure that luma and chroma is in limited tv range and we insert the comment, it gets dithered down to 8bit 4:2:0 planar (yv12) and re-encoded to H.264 25i with a way lower bitrate.



Quote:
Actually it might be useful for animes, since usually it's done into Apple ProRes 4:2:2 @ 10 bit.
Animations of anime characters and so on are generally produced in RGB but they get exported as AppleProRes HQ 4:2:2 10bit progressive as masterfile which is the one that is generally sent to studios. I've been encoding those files from 2013 to 2015 with my previous job (still as encoder but at a different company) however I can tell you that while some studios work really well and give you a nice clean masterfile without any issues, some others don't and the file provided has any kind of issues I'm looking at you, Sentai!.
As a side note, sometimes old japanese broadcasters living in the stone-age prefer to get an XDCAM-50 file instead which is just a crappy MPEG-2 8bit yv16 telecined which is a shame 'cause if you are a sub-licensor you don't get the original masterfile from the Studio, but the mezzanine file sent to the japanese broadcaster instead.
Anyway, I did like that job, but I prefer to work as encoder in the new company as I've been encoding documentaries, tv series and other more important and exciting things than anime.

Quote:
(I have few friends who worked on such files, but they didn't share those with me due to NDA).
Of course they didn't, if we ever even dare to upload such a thing and it gets leaked, not only the company we work for loses the licence but it also has to pay a big fee. What happens to the person who shared the file? Well, it gets sacked and he can say goodbye to this job as no one would ever dare to hire him in any other studio.
I can't share their name for privacy reasons, but I know a few people who have been sacked only because someone hacked their account and stole a proxy file (not even the masterfile!!) and shared it publicly on the internet via torrent before it was aired.

Last edited by FranceBB; 8th October 2019 at 20:21.
FranceBB is offline   Reply With Quote