With almost every news dept in the country being completely non linear who still uses a slate with a countdown when feeding from the truck? I personally feed :20 bars and tone :10 left at 1k :10 right at 1.2k and a :10 sec countdown with 3 frames of a slate followed by 1 second of black before the feed. Is this overkill? It seems to help the editors and sets a audio level for engineering. The slate is created via newscutter using the NCRS tool and a generator effect. The slug, trt, and crew is filled in automatically.