Berkeley Sound Artists Video and OMF Specs

Both the picture and the OMF should have head and tail pops.

Video

Please give us a Quicktime using a DV codec. Common codecs include DV, DVCPRO and DVC50. But DO NOT use the AVID DV Codec.

There needs to be a window burn of the timecode. The best placement of your window burn is in either top corner. It doesn't have to be very big. If your project is letterboxed, please put the window burn in the letterboxed area. Try to avoid putting window burns in the same location as subtitles or lower thirds.

We need pre and post roll on the video. In an ideal world, start the movie and the window burn at 0:59:50:00 and add a second or 2 to the movie past the tail pop.

Please make sure that your mixdown audio is in the movie. We use that as our guidetrack.

Note: these movies tend to be very large.

OMF

We like embedded OMFs. OMF version 2. Please give us handles. We love 5 second handles, but 3 seconds will work in most cases. The file size of the OMF cannot exceed 2 gigabytes. If you hit that limit, split your sequence into 2 or more parts. Don't split it up according to time, split it up by tracks. For example, give us tracks 1-4 in one OMF and the remanding tracks in another OMF.

FCP v6.x and AVID OMFs give us your volume graphs. OMFs from FCP version 5x and below, do not. If you are working in FCP 5.x or below, please give us a copy of your FCP sequence file along with your OMF. We can produce an OMF with the volume information from your sequence.

Please give us wild sound and room tone in either another OMF or as audio files (Aif, WAV, whatever your file format is).

If you have any questions, please call Jim LeBrecht at:

510 486 2290 office
510 388 2290 cell