FS700 and "broadcast quality"

With all that's been said, I think the 422 8-Bit minimum is more of a European thing. I can say that in the USA, they don't really care. I've shot a number of on-air, broadcast spots for Disney, SyFy, HGTV, Bravo and a few other networks just using the FS700 internal 420 8-Bit and nobody cares. I guess Europe just has higher standards.

In fact, about 5 years ago I worked on the NBC rebrand, a major, major job. All the nighttime talent from their major shows (Jay Leno, cast of Heroes, etc...) were all shot on the Canon 5D2. Which seems kind of crazy since it aired 24/7 for a year.

Of course now, I shoot everything with the 7Q so no issues at all. But yeah, here in the 'Merica, we don't give a F#%K what it's shot on.
 
Our American friends have grown up watching NTSC.
So there might be a tradition to give a damn f&&@.

In Germany, we do not have gold standard either.
The public broadcasters request a high technical standard for feature productions, but they deliver poor. National broadcaster ZDF is not able to playout native HDTV on their digital channels, the same regional public broadcasters in Bavaria or Hessia. And they produce in 1080i and play out 720p.

So we end up with poor quality. But that crap happens later in the technical pipeline.
 
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With all that's been said, I think the 422 8-Bit minimum is more of a European thing. I can say that in the USA, they don't really care. I've shot a number of on-air, broadcast spots for Disney, SyFy, HGTV, Bravo and a few other networks just using the FS700 internal 420 8-Bit and nobody cares. I guess Europe just has higher standards.

In fact, about 5 years ago I worked on the NBC rebrand, a major, major job. All the nighttime talent from their major shows (Jay Leno, cast of Heroes, etc...) were all shot on the Canon 5D2. Which seems kind of crazy since it aired 24/7 for a year.

Of course now, I shoot everything with the 7Q so no issues at all. But yeah, here in the 'Merica, we don't give a F#%K what it's shot on.

I don't really shoot for broadcasters, a friend rents my FS700 from time to time and said, as long as the TV'ers receive a ProRes422 File in the end, nobody really cares if this was converted from 420 or recorded as 422 - he's shooting and afterwards editing everything though, not sure if broadcasters here would be happy if you give them a SD-card containing AVCHD folders...
 
The 'broadcast quality' specs are defined by the European Broadcasting Union: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r118.pdf - 8bit 422 colour and certain forms of compression are defined as there is usually some form of colour correction, titling and recompression involved when things are broadcast ie you don't want to lay heavy compression on top of heavy compression. Notably they do accept lower quality material for News over drama production.
 
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