Work question!

I rule.

Let's say that you're dealing with a 3rd party agency that's responsible for submitting content to you. By content, I mean mainly images and videos and flash animation.

Now let's say that you have specific requirements that need to be met for said content.

What would you list out in terms of requirements.

For example:

"Hey you, agency. When you send across an video, please make sure that it's:

16:9 aspect ratio Minimum 30fps Encoded with: ____ File Format: ____ . . ."

What else would you put on your wishlist for images and videos and flash animation and lions and tigers and bears?

Thanks muchly.

Minimum resolution for sure. I get crap for print all the time that's been pulled from a web page. 200x250? Yeah, that'll print up _real _nice.

it's tough to make a list without requirements. It depends on whats being done to the video. if you'r re-encoding it you're gonna want raws. If its for dvd you want 1080p, mpeg 4, etc. The framerate should be codec native. 24.99999 or 28 or 30 or whatever.

If you're just using the video as is you're gonna want h.264 at whatever pixel dimensions the design calls for in whatever file extension you need - mov, flv, etc.

You're also going to ant to stipulate the audio. same thing applies. you want wav or aac uncompressed for encoding.

if they're encoding the video you want to specify the entire encoding process choices and toolsets, for example, quicktime pro, multipass, variable bit stream, etc.

Same goes for sound. Also you want to normalize your sound across videos. does the agency have this capability?

Is the agency savvy enough to review the video and check for font and text animation after compression?

Also is your final presentation aspect ratio 4:3? are the source videos 16:9? Does the agency need to add black bar letterboxing when required?

You're going to want your clients to understand the options of web delivery, high quality but lower than HD pixel size, compressed, but with HD 1080 and 720p dimensions, high quality with 1080p: true HD, etc etc.

Before requesting anything, especially huge formats such as 4gig+ uncomrpessed avi, be sure your equipment can manage and encode the files. You don't want a 4.2 gig video on windows XP with quicktime delivered on a usb stick only to find you can't transfer a file that big because of ntfs or find that tyring to edit them in after effects is killing the macbook that seemed so great when you were editing yer home movies.

So that was maybe no help at all, but thats my list of concerns rather than a wishlist.

That was actually a lot of help.

Most of it's covered in my docs, but like you said, it's tough to nail this stuff down without requirements, which is exactly the situation we're in.

We know how WE'd do content, but that's after we get project requirements.

So to try to tell an agency how we expect content in the absence of these requirements is a bit tricky.

Other than what's already mentioned, be sure to ask for all fonts used unless they are standard fonts.

Also for your images, specifying RGB is handy so you don't get 600 dpi CMYK print files.