Example Slate for Printing Tapes in Final Cut
I’ve delivered tapes to many broadcasters and producers including NBC, National Geographic, Red Bull, etc. Their requirements are pretty similar, so it’s fairly easy to just use a generic template for all your tape prints. This is one I’ve been using for awhile. I will eventually add more templates for different uses, but this is the most general one that I have.
Click here to download the zipped Final Cut Pro 7 project file with this example slate. It’s just the FCP text generator. Replace my info with your info.
More specifically:
1st line is the name of your production company. Some broadcasters and producers will require you to put their name here instead
2nd and 3rd lines are the name of your show, the season and episode number, and the version number for this particular tape. I’ve had to deliver rough cuts on tape and putting the version number is helpful if you’re sending the broadcaster multiple revisions
4th line is the house number of your episode. Sometimes the broadcaster will give this to you, other times they will tell you to make one up given certain guidelines. Or this could be your internal house number.
5th line is the more specific name for this episode. In this example, since we were delivering version 1, it was called HD rough. For final versions, we would also write in things like “SD Pan and Scan”, “HD Final”, “Logo Bug for Web”, etc.
6th-9th lines are for the actual timecodes of the different segments of the show. This particular example is based on a 22min TV show with 2 commercial breaks (in which we added 15 seconds of running black to the tape). Timecode for credits is given so the broadcaster knows when in the program they can squash your image down into the bottom of the screen so they can cram in more ads. *cough* TBS *cough*
10th-13th lines are for layout of the audio channels. This particular example was taken from an HDCAM print, which has 4 audio tracks. Betacam SP is 2 and HDCAM SR is up to 12. You can also have Dolby E surround audio on track pairs. So this section can change a lot and you might need to reduce the font size if you have to deliver more audio channels
Lines 14 and 15 are Show TRT (total running time) and Show TPT (total program time). We added 15 seconds of black for each commercial break, so that’s why these numbers are different.
Last line is the date