A television commercial that the production company produced in very high quality, is heavily compressed for digital delivery (as required by broadcast and cable stations), likely transcoded to conform to stations’ servers, compressed again by the cable company feed, then further distorted when it hits a flat screen TV. Each step degrading the quality of the commercial. Finally the consumer views this degraded commercial against national feed high definition programming that has not been forced to endure so much heavy compression. Not a good, nor fair comparison.

Once the commercial leaves the hands of the production company, this quality degrading process is completely out of the control of clients, advertising agencies, and production companies.

In summary, in the current economic climate, most television stations in markets ranked ten or below are not rushing to re-tool their equipment to allow them to accept high definition TV spots. In fact, in Hampton Roads, we contacted all the broadcast stations and Cox Cable and were told they plan on re-tooling to accept high definition TV spots in three to five years, with three years being the average! While the broadcast and television networks tout high definition to the consumer, they actually only deliver high definition when they are feeding from the national network or their local news; any TV spot that is inserted locally will not be broadcast in high definition and in fact will look somewhat worse than the old CRT televisions of just a few years ago. So we, the advertiser, advertising agencies, and production companies, are stuck with the consumer expecting beautiful sound and picture but getting much less from our TV spots.

So what can we do?

First, educate yourself on the process and understand that when you see your spot on a flat screen TV and it doesn’t look nearly as good as the spots that come down the national high definition feed, that it’s not your advertising agency’s fault nor the production company’s. It is the result of television stations’ incomplete transition to digital television. Television stations did go digital for broadcasting programs, but they haven’t finished the transition; now they must re-tool their equipment to allow them to accept high definition TV spots.

Second, in the production process, choose a quality advertising agency that you know will choose a quality video production vendor who will shoot the video at the highest quality possible given the budget. And be aware that there are many quality levels of HD; if someone says your spot will be shot in HD make sure it is shot in the highest quality HD. HDV is not high definition quality. If the source video is high quality, then it will better withstand the multiple compression processes it will have to endure on its way to the consumer’s flat screen television. Your spot will still not look like true HD, but it will look as good as you can get at this time, given the compression requirements.

Third, complain often and loudly to the local television stations and cable companies. They will only move faster on replacing their equipment to accept local high definition TV spots when it hits them in the pocketbook with unsatisfied advertisers. Once broadcast stations re-tool to accept spots produced in HD will the HD spots you are paying to produce finally look like the HD quality you and your clients deserve to see on the screen.

If you want to learn more you will have to dig deep, mainly in professional video production forums. Google will bring up much more information. Below are some good links:

• Very good overview for agencies on HD/SD commercials
• FCC Paper on digital transition
• The Creative Cow Forum
• Comcast HD Quality Reduction: Details, Screenshots (AV Science Forum)
• Executive Profile
  SD Advertisements Still Dominate (Television Broadcast)
• High definition television (Wikipedia)
• Does Comcast Signal COMPRESSION = DEPRESSION? (DLS Reports/Broadband)
• Hi-Def Forum
• Cable’s crunched signals irritate HD die-hards (USA Today)
• Cable TV under fire for degrading HD quality (MSNBC)
• Walkthrough: “Why is my HDTV ugly compared to my old tube tv?” How to setup the HDTV (AV Science Forum)
• http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/34579/118003.html (eCoustics.com)
• Cutting through the confusion (CNet)
• A Discussion On Poor SD On HDTVs (HighDef Forum)

6) The production company compresses the digital file per the specifications of DGFastChannel and/or Cox Spot Express and uploads the heavily compressed file into DGFastChannel’s upload system and/or into Cox Spot Express spot upload system.

7) DGFastChannel and/or Cox Spot Express receives the compressed TV spot from the production company per their file specifications. Once the digital file is received, a confirmation is sent to the production company. At this point, quality control of the spot is completely out of the hands of the production company.

DGFastChannel and/or Cox Spot Express then and do a quality control check of the digital file to make sure it was successfully uploaded, however in our experience the quality check is sometimes done and sometimes not, at the discretion of DGFastChannel and/or Spot Express. The spot is then digitally distributed to the stations where a media buy has been placed by the advertising agency.

DGFastChannel sends the spot to the TV stations included in the media buy. Cox Spot Express loads the spot into their servers per the media buy.

9) If the TV commercial is to be broadcast on network stations:

The television stations receive the spot from DGFastChannel. Each station has a different system requiring a specific digital file type in order to work in their system. In many cases a television station may not be able to use the digital file type provided by DGFastChannel so the station may transcode (re-compress) the file to yet another format that is compatible with their servers. This is another possible point at which the TV commercial may be compressed yet again, reducing quality. Once the spot has been transcoded to a file type that will work in the station’s system, it is loaded into the stations’ servers and broadcast per the media buy.

10) If the TV spot is to be broadcast on cable:

The cable company loads the spot onto their servers, but there’s another gauntlet your commercial must pass thru before it reaches the consumer’s TV set.

Cable companies have a limited amount of data they can send down the cable to your home. If they want to add more stations to their cable service, they have a problem; how to send more data down a wire with finite capacity? They way they get around this challenge is to remove some data going down the wire to make room for more data. You guessed it, they compress their entire feed! So now your TV spot has been compressed yet again! While this saves the cable company money, it makes the TV spot lose even more quality.

11) Finally, the TV spot arrives at the consumer’s flat screen television set. It has been significantly compressed up to three times, each time losing quality. Now the TV spot must endure one last quality degrading process; flat screen TV sets are designed to display large HD video. SD video is much smaller in size than HD so it must be enlarged to fit the flat screen TV. When SD video is enlarged, it looks worse. For example, have you ever taken a digital photograph and blown it up really big? If so, you’d have noticed that the more you enlarge it, the worse it looks. Same thing happens when you enlarge SD video; the more you enlarge it, the worse it looks. In addition, the TV set has two options on how to display the SD TV spot; it can either display the TV spot with black bars on either side of the spot (pillar boxing) but the spot won’t fill the entire screen, or it can stretch the spot out wide and fill the whole screen, however when it stretches the TV spot out wide, it distorts the video. Another (!) quality degradation.

In Part Four we’ll look at the end of your spot’s journey.

First, some background:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated that all television stations must broadcast a digital signal and currently all stations now broadcast a digital signal, however not all stations broadcast a high definition signal. Digital and high definition are two different things. While the majority of broadcast stations in the country have installed new equipment to broadcast digitally and provide a high definition feed for their programming, only the stations in the top ten markets and a spotty few other markets have completely re-tooled to also accept a commercial produced in high definition.

In markets ranked eleven on down the majority of television stations (including cable) stations have not re-tooled their equipment to accept, nor broadcast, commercials produced in high definition and in fact, will only accept a TV commercial in standard definition format. Standard definition (SD) is the format that was used for television broadcasting before stations went digital and can look very good onscreen on the older CRT television sets. Remember, a station can broadcast a digital signal but still not broadcast a high definition signal.

High definition (HD) video captures more information and so can look much better than standard definition if done correctly and viewed on a flat screen television. However since the majority of broadcast stations have not re-tooled to accept high definition commercials, all production companies must deliver most of their commercials in standard definition, even when you have shot, edited, and paid for high definition! This important point will make more sense as you read more in Part 2.

Note: High definition vs. standard definition is a topic all its own.

A visual representation of the quality difference between HD and SD

So on with the journey of our spot…

1) Client directs their advertising agency to produce a TV commercial, or “spot”.

2) Ad agency creates concept for the spot, producing a storyboard, script, and overall strategic and creative direction.

3) Ad agency hires a production company, like Earworks Media, to help them produce the spot.

4) The production company shoots video using the highest quality professional digital video equipment the budget will allow, shooting in either SD or HD. The raw digital video footage is edited on a digital non-linear editing system such as the industry standard AVID or Final Cut Pro systems, producing a high quality digital master file of the spot in standard definition (as required by the broadcast stations).

5) The production company prepares the master TV commercial for delivery to television stations and cable companies. The production company has two delivery options:

a). Tape. Yields a high quality “dub” of the TV commercial, and will not have to go thru so many layers of compression, however most television stations prefer electronic delivery.

b) Digital delivery. Rapidly becoming the only way television and cable companies will accept a TV spot. In theory, a great delivery vehicle; a high quality, inexpensive and efficient way to deliver the TV spot. In current practice, a terrible way to deliver a TV spot. Why?

A high quality digital file of a TV commercial is very large and therefore time consuming and expensive to send over the Internet and especially expensive to store on television stations’ computer servers. Many large files require many large server computers to store the files; conversely the smaller the file, the cheaper and easier it is to digitally deliver and store it. To cut costs the broadcast stations had to find a way to reduce the size, or “compress”, the digital files to make them cheaper to store. Compression is a process where bits of information are selectively removed by special software or dedicated hardware so that the compressed file is much smaller than the original high quality file, but removing this information results in quality degradation; the more a video file is compressed, the worse it looks and sounds. The DVDs you watch at home can store large amounts of information but the movie still has to fit onto the DVD media, so it is compressed, but not too much, so they still look and sound good.

Locally inserted television commercials aren’t so lucky. Unfortunately the heavy amount of compression broadcasters require for the delivery of TV commercials results in significantly reduced quality. For example, a full quality digital video file of a :30 second TV spot is approximately 1 gigabyte in size (or 1000 megabytes). Television stations and cable companies currently require a digital video file to be compressed to approximately 80 megabytes, a very significant reduction in file size that significantly reduces the quality of the video and audio.

Currently there are only two options available to production companies for digital TV commercial delivery; DGFastChannel for network affiliate broadcast stations, and each cable network’s proprietary system, which in Hampton Roads is Cox’s Spot Express.

There are other options than DGFastChannel, but DGFastChannel is the largest provider. Other delivery providers include USA Studios, Edgecast, and Spot Box Extreme but these providers require similar compression requirements.

DGFastChannel and Spot Express both require very specific compression specifications in order to accept a TV commercial from a production company. In addition, the production company must be officially certified by DGFastChannel to participate in their delivery system, and Cox also requires pre-testing before they will accept a commercial. (Earworks Media is certified for both DGFastChannel and Cox Spot Express). So all production companies have no choice but to heavily compress the TV commercial per the specifications of DGFastChannel and/or Cox Spot Express, greatly reducing the quality.

In Part Three, we’ll continue the journey of your TV spot.