Questacon TV Ads

We love our ads!

They're a little crazy, but we think they're pretty cool. Up until now they have only been seen on television in our local area, but now the whole world can join in the fun!

Watch them all!

Each TV ad is presented with a small, medium and big version, that are made for 56, 256 and 512 kbps internet connections. Click on the ad you want to watch, choose your connection speed and enjoy!

Our television ads were produced by Ma@d Communication and Plump Films. The 3-D effects are by Eye Candy. Capture and compression for viewing online was done in-house by Questacon's Webteam.


Questacon Birthday Parties		Eaten Alive

Mini Q		Q by Night

Spectacular Science Shows		Terrorsaurus

TV Ad Podcasts

XML feed.

Our ads are now also available via an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed for podcasting via programs like iTunes or Juice . These programs are availble for free, for both Mac and PC.

These files are encoded as m4v video. You can watch them on a video iPod or a computer (you will need the free QuickTime 7 player to watch these movies on your computer).

Technically speaking

Like Europe, Australia uses the PAL television broadcast system, which is quite different from the NTSC system used in other parts of the world. PAL displays 25 frames per second (NTSC has 29.97) and each frame is made up of 625 horizontal lines (525 in NTSC). Both systems show 720 pixels across the screen and use pixels that, unlike computers, are not square but slightly rectangular in shape (4:3 PAL TV pixels have an aspect ratio of 1.066).

These online versions of the ads have different frame rates and sizes, and they all have square pixels. They also use differing qualities of audio.

File Size Screen Size Frame Rate Video Quality Audio Quality

(pixels) (fps) (data rate, kbps) (data rate, kbps)

Podcast 320 x 240 25 576 110, stereo

Big 320 x 240 12.5 420 48, stereo

Medium 240 x 180 12.5 210 24, mono

Small 160 x 120 6 24 16, mono

Questacon's video editing equipment doesn't include a ($50 000) Digital Betacam tape deck, so we first had the footage transferred to DVCAM (similar to miniDV). From there the ads were captured into Apple's Final Cut Pro HD (video editing software) where they were cropped to length and the Australian Government Crest added to the end of each. These new versions were then exported as separate QuickTime movies, at full DV quality.

The individual Flash movies used on the website were then created using Sorenson Squeeze, which compressed them (to the above specifications) and adjusted them from non square (TV) pixels into square (computer) pixels. QuickTime Pro 7.1 was used to create the m4v H.264 podcast versions.

The amount of compression, or “squeezing” is amazing. The original QuickTime DV versions of the ads use about 3.5 MB/s (65 MB for these 19 s clips). Even the podcast version uses only 0.07 MB/s (1 MB for 14 s). By comparison, the original Digital Betacam footage would require 24 MB/s if captured to computer!