Shooting commercials for Comcast, NBC and other television outlets can often be complicated when it comes to formats. This can cut into your commercial spot’s airing times, especially when you have a large campaign that needs to air from Tuesday through Friday for a large expo that weekend, and Comcast doesn’t have the proper setup to transfer your commercial spot. This means your commercial spot will not air on-time! But Crimson Chain Productions has been dealing with the format issues from the various stations for years.

It’s a complicated process, especially because many Comcast subsidiary cable stations don’t have setups that are the same as the next. One may want a submission on DVD; another may want a Quicktime file; and yet another may want it on Beta SP or MiniDV. Even more, a salesperson at a particular Comcast office may tell you that they allow a certain format, when they don’t. Most Comcast cable subsidiaries still don’t broadcast in High Definition, so they aren’t setup for High Definition ingests (even in 2010).

Recently (in the Fall of 2009), NBC decided to move all station ingests to a central hub in Georgia. This means that an original commercial format spec, as quoted by the NBC affiliate, may not be what the hub is actually allowing. They are accepting High Definition, but only certain formats.

Crimson Chain Productions knows how to deal with formats. We can walk you through the entire shooting process and create a commercial spot that will air on-time for your advertising campaign.