I notice people trying to find film countdowns on the WWW, or asking how to fake up one in their video editor. So why not give them a real one to use? This was 25 frame per second 16mm film leader, with a pip at the 2 flash, but otherwise silent. It's been projected onto a small screen, and filmed with a 3-CCD industrial camera. YouTube will probably mess up the timing and synchronisation. The countdown leader is from an early 1970s Australian TV commercial, distributed on 16mm film, complete with scratches and dirt, so you don't need to simulate anything. The PBL-PBL-PBL sound, at the start, is caused by the commercial's name being handwritten over the sound stripe. How to use a leader: It should be edited in so that the program starts at the moment it would have counted down to zero. Normally you'd put silent black leader as padding between the brief appearance of the "2" and your program. However for programs that might dissolve in, over the top of a prior program, you may have lead-in pictures BEFORE the zero start point. But the program still starts at the zero point. The lead-in pictures should be something that doesn't matter if it's not seen, nor has anything that would look bad if it happened in the middle of a dissolve. But it's far more normal to have black lead-in. During non-automated playtback, the operator would count along with the film, reading, "8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2," off the film, and, "1, 0," in their head, having got themselves in sync with the visible <b>...</b>
SMPTE
universal
leader
film
countdown
