"Leader, front, and back pads"

T

tariqari

Member
Hello! I am in a video production class and our assignment this week is to edit together footage of a bank robbery. The assignment description calls for "The edited piece must be 1-2 minutes long (no shorter than 60ss and no longer than 2 minutes) and must contain appropriate leader and front pad coming out of the countdown and back pad."

Could some please tell me what exactly are "leader, front and back pads"? I am still waiting for a response from my instructor but time is ticking and the assignment is due in a couple of days. I am also curious if anyone thinks that the "padding" will count toward the Total Run Time?

Thanks in advance for your responses!
 
Leader is usually an 8 second countdown that you see starting at 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, then one frame of 2 (the 2 pop) with a beep, two seconds of black, then FFOP (first frame of picture). My gut says it does not count against program running time (but you need to get that confirmed). Back Pad is a new term, tail leader and such can be used - typically I get lazy and do a reverse head leader. Job Te Burg has made a very nice countdown leader that use for 24fps productions and can be found here: http://leaders.jobterburg.nl/

Michael
 
Thanks that is very helpful. I also had this explained to me in class today it is pretty much spot on with what you said! Thanks!
 
Oh, I was also told it typically does not count toward TRT and that TRT reflects the First Frame of Picture to the Last Frame of Picture, or the "production." In case that helps any future people who stumble upon this.
 
Anyone still needing to use countdowns, headers, bars & tone, or even slates for digital delivery?
It's good that they're teaching you this stuff, but it's less and less used these days. The reason it was used originally was for film and tape. For example, editing on tape required pre roll for the tape deck to get up to speed and be able to play or record frame accurately. If you ever get the chance to work on a tape to tape 3 point edit system you'll see what I mean. Mark your in and out on one, and in point on the other, hit the button and both tape decks rewind a few seconds before the in point, then record exactly on the in point timecode since they're up to speed. Fun stuff.
Bars and tone is another one you don't see as much of. In the days of analog tape it was really useful to calibrate the playback.
Slates are also going away.
Digital files don't really need it, especially since a lot of the information that we used to have to put in the slate can be included in the file name or as metadata. For the BluRay and DVD projects that I do, I prefer when the clients leave that stuff out. Back in the days of tape it was annoying when we didn't have that stuff and had to guess what the program start should be.
Progress I guess.
 
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