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What you actually receive, and whether it will cut
A licence settles what you may do with a shot. It says much less about what lands on your drive. Five technical fields decide whether the clip drops into the timeline or becomes an afternoon of problems.
TechnicalDelivery11 min read
The clip looked right in the preview player. It was approved, licensed, downloaded, and it does not match anything else in the sequence. Nothing has gone wrong contractually. What went wrong is that nobody read the technical panel next to the price.
Five fields carry almost all of the risk: resolution, frame rate, codec, colour and audio. They are usually printed on the item page. The habit worth building is to read them before the shot is shown to anyone who might fall in love with it.
Resolution, and what the catalogue means by it
Resolution is the least ambiguous of the five, with two traps. The first is upscaling: a clip labelled as ultra high definition may have been scanned or shot at a lower resolution and enlarged. It fills the frame and carries no more detail than it started with. The second is that the number describes the file, not the usable picture, and a clip with a soft lens or a heavy compression history has less real resolution than its label suggests.
- Standard definition: 720 by 576 in the European tradition, 720 by 486 or 480 in the North American one. Most pre-2000 video archive lives here.
- High definition: 1280 by 720, and 1920 by 1080, which remains the working baseline for a great deal of broadcast delivery.
- 2K: 2048 by 1080 in the cinema specification, and a common resolution for film scans.
- Ultra high definition and 4K: 3840 by 2160 for television, 4096 by 2160 in the cinema specification. The two are not the same width, which matters when a clip is dropped into a fixed sequence.
- 6K and 8K: increasingly offered on new material, useful mainly as reframing headroom rather than as a delivery target.
Aspect ratio travels with resolution and causes more visible damage. Archive material is very often 4:3, and it belongs in a 16:9 sequence with black at the sides, not stretched to fill. Stretching a 4:3 newsreel to widescreen is the single most recognisable sign that nobody senior looked at the edit.
Frame rate, which is where archive material bites
Frame rate is the field that produces the most expensive surprises, because a mismatch does not look like an error. It looks like slightly wrong motion, and it is often noticed only on a large screen.
- 24 and 23.976
- The film rate, and its television cousin. The fractional rate is exactly 24 multiplied by 1000/1001, a legacy of the shift to colour television, when the field rate was nudged down from 60 to 59.94 Hz to stop the colour subcarrier interfering with the sound carrier. The two are close enough to look identical and far enough apart to drift out of sync across a long sequence.
- 25 and 50
- The European television rates. Film transferred for these systems has traditionally been run at 25 frames per second rather than 24, which makes the picture and the sound run about four per cent fast unless the audio is corrected.
- 29.97 and 59.94
- The North American television rates, the same 1000/1001 arithmetic applied to 30 and 60. Material transferred from 24 fps film to 29.97 carries 3:2 pulldown, where film frames are spread unevenly across video fields. Pulldown must be removed before the clip is cut into a 24 fps sequence, or the motion judders.
- Interlaced against progressive
- Older video is usually interlaced: each frame is two fields captured a moment apart. Freeze one and the moving parts comb. Deinterlacing is routine but never free, and it costs vertical resolution.
- Silent era material
- Filmed before rates were standardised, commonly in the region of 16 to 18 frames per second. Played at 24 it moves comically fast, which is why so much early film looks hurried. A good transfer corrects it; a cheap one does not.
Codec, and why the preview file is not the clip
Codecs divide into two families, and confusing them is what turns a finished offline into a rebuilt online.
Mastering codecs store every frame independently. Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD or DNxHR are the two families most footage arrives in. Because each frame decodes on its own, they scrub smoothly, cut cleanly and survive being graded. They are also large.
Delivery codecs such as H.264 and H.265 store most frames as differences from their neighbours. That is why a preview file downloads in seconds, and why it degrades when pushed through a grade. Watermarked comps are almost always delivered this way: they exist so the shot can be tested in the edit, not so it can be finished there.
Two attributes sit underneath the codec name and matter more than it does. Chroma subsampling describes how much colour information survives: 4:2:0 keeps the least and is normal for delivery files, 4:2:2 is the usual mastering compromise, 4:4:4 keeps it all. Keying a green screen from a 4:2:0 file is possible and rarely pleasant. Bit depth decides how far a grade can be pushed before skies and gradients band: 8-bit is common in delivery files, 10-bit and above in mastering ones.
The comp is for deciding. The master is for finishing. Every schedule that treats them as interchangeable pays for it in the online.
Colour, and the file that looks broken on purpose
Most licensed footage is delivered ready to view, encoded for the Rec. 709 colour space that high definition television has used for decades. Some newer material is offered in a log encoding instead, which looks flat and grey until a conversion is applied, and holds far more latitude for grading. Occasionally raw camera files are offered, which are not video at all until processed.
None of these is better in the abstract. What matters is that the whole sequence is treated the same way. A flat log clip dropped between two graded ones is not a fault in the clip.
Audio, and the archive that has none
A great deal of archive film is mute. Picture was often shot without sound, and where sound existed it may survive separately or not at all. Newsreel frequently arrives with a commentary track and library music underneath, which is a rights problem as much as a technical one: the music in an archive clip may carry separate obligations from the picture.
Where footage is delivered with sound, check whether it is genuinely synchronous, and whether the licence covers it. Some suppliers licence picture only and require the audio to be replaced.
The check before you commit
| Field | What to confirm | Consequence of missing it |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution | Native, not upscaled; and the aspect ratio | Soft picture, or a stretched frame |
| Frame rate | The delivered rate, and whether pulldown is present | Judder, or drift across a long sequence |
| Codec | That a mastering file is included, not only a comp | An online that cannot be finished |
| Colour | Rec. 709, log or raw, and bit depth | A clip that will not match the grade |
| Audio | Present or mute, sync or laid, and licensed | A clearance problem found late |
| Identifier | The supplier's clip reference, recorded at the moment of choosing | Ordering the wrong shot, or not finding it again |
Where to go next
The technical panel is one half of an item page. The other half is the rights statement, and what it fixes is set out in how footage licensing works, from first search to signed license. If a term on the item page is unfamiliar, the working glossary of footage and licensing terms defines the vocabulary that quotes and delivery notes are written in.
Corrections to this entry
- : added the note on chroma subsampling and keying, after a reader pointed out that the original text mentioned bit depth alone.