To dead roll, or not to dead roll?

[Garrett]

Here's a question for ya...
When I worked in Lubbock I discovered that in the MCO boothm, there were two opposing philosophies when it came to playing back taped programs.

On one station, we dead rolled everything that was on tape. If there was 2 miutes and 30 seconds of black during the commerical on the tape, we filled 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

But on the other TV station just next door (divided by just a glass), dead rolling was sometimes the exception to the rule. Most of the time, the rule was to scroll forward and keep the tape in cue.

So which is the better rule, dead roll, or not?

 

[newsmark]

Depends on how your master control operation works. If MC plays back the actual tape, inserts commercials and goes back to the tape, it's better to include black for the full break. The fewer times someone has to start and stop the tape, the less likely you are to cue to the wrong segment, or in the case of some syndicated shows, accidentally cue to a promo instead of the next segment.

(It's also easier to time the show while recording... just zero the counter when you start.)

On the other hand, if master is gonna dub the show into a server, they'll probably dub it a segment at a time, and the amount of black is irrelevant. You can actually gain a little time this way, since a break can really be 2:00 instead of 2:02 (with props to Chuck Woolery).

Recueing? recuing? Re-q-ing the tape might also be better if your traffic department likes to jack with break times.

 

[snoman]

Well, dead-rolling used to be an option, when I worked with tapes. I work with Automation and Servers now. All of the shows are in profiles (on hard drives). We prep shows for the automation, with barters separate. So, if we have to join a show in progress, we just adjust the duration and the "Start Of Message", which is where the segment begins. It's a lot easier than dead-rolling. It's also easier for traffic, because they don't have to adjust for any break times. They can make the breaks as long or as short as they want, as long as the show times out right. The only taped shows we still use are infomercials. We record all our shows on tape, as well as profile, in case the profile craps out or there is a problem with the server, but we dump the show into another profile off tape, if that is the case. And, our tapes our digital so it doesn't lose a generation, if you have to dump it back into another profile.