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Best way to digitize Beta SP?
Hi
I have my originals on Beta SP and some on Mini DV. What is the best way to digitize it so I can keep the original quality?
Thanks
Eyal Gordin -
9 Replies
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I guess for Beta SP you need a capture card with component in – something like a BlackMagic Decklink with the component in connectors, or there are various other options for Windows and Mac.
Uncompressed 10-bit is great if you can afford the disc space and speed. Some very-high-quality older capture boards will compress 3 or 4 to one virtually transparently – less disc space, but you may need more expensive SCSI discs. (I was recently offered an entire such edit kit, using Perception Realtime board, in a twin Pentium running Windows 2000 (500 MHz as I recall) system for
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You don’t necessarily need a card – I’m using the SD connect (external box – takes component or composite, analogue or digital in & out – then sends through the firewire to the computer – full machine control also. The price was under $1K and well worth it.
slainte,
marisu -
Hi Eyal,
Convergent Design makes a transcoder called SD-Connect that can digitize the beta SP to 10 bit video and 24 bit audio. The SD-Connect can transcode to DV over firewire or uncompressed over firewire with Premiere Pro.
The SD-Connect also offers RS-422 control of the beta deck including frame accurate insert/assemble editing.
Check out our website for additional information:
https://www.convergent-design.comWe offer a 15 day free evaluation.
Regards,
John Schell
Convergent Design Inc. -
Thanks Mike,
I might have an outfit that will digitize the footage to 10 bit, but can Premiere handle it without rendering it down? Is it substentially better than DV format?
Thanks
EG -
Thanks John,
I might have an outfit that will digitize the footage to 10 bit, but can Premiere handle it without rendering it down? Is it substentially better than DV format?
Thanks
EG -
PPro plays back 10-bit uncompressed fine if the disc speeds are fast enough (around 26MB/s for playback single stream, standard definition, capture or playback) These isk speeds are demanding, even for standard definition ; you’d probably need a fast SATA array dedicated to the video capture to make it work. It’s a commmitment. Decklink on Windows with PPRo will play back unrendered, and will do real-time dissolves (on a fast system able to meet two playback streams each at 26MBs …)
You’d also really need a way to view the output on a video monitor. You could find a way with a fast system graphics card to support an additional video monitor, but I think many people opt for additional specialist hardware to convert digits to viewable video out. Non-DV video won’t work through a miniDV recorder (or camcorder).
A card like Decklink can be fairly cheap – (Decklink SP has component in and out, and prices at not too high – around $600 USD – a bit more for the Extreme with SDI in as well) As Marisu points out there are also break-out boxes (by the likes of Canopus, Convergent and others) which handle various video, audio and machine control in and out through a firewire connector – which saves you opening the system box if you don’t like that, don’t have a decent spec machine or have no spare slots. Some will convert all to DV; some will pass various video formats through the firewire connector.
How much better is uncompressed? That’s arguable. For graphics, uncompressed can look a lot better than DV.
For filmed material, great Beta SP, carefully lit and photographed on a late-version broadcast camera with a broadcast lens, can be really excellent – if your viewer sees it on a good screen.
If you’re going to distribute via DVD, Beta SP will still look better technically than Mini DV (as long as your encoding is OK) But fast, new-style filming on cheap UVW100 Beta SP camcorders done by amateurs won’t look that great …
It depends a lot who your customers are, and how they will see the material, and whether you can afford or justify the more expensive (non-DV) route in terms of additional sales to broadcasters.
If you’re selling to broadcasters then you’ll probably be thinking DigiBeta, and, real soon now, High Definition. For corporate, DVCAM / DVCPRO (and maybe HDV?) offer very good performance for the price, for viewing on DVD or lower-quality distribution media …. so where’s your audience / market along with can you afford it could be key questions.
Unless you’re committed to a high-end broadcast market place and have the finances to go uncompressed, why not look for a box to convert your component to DV / firewire and save the money ..?
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Mike,
First of all, thanks a lot for the education! I’m a Director of Photography and I get my work by showing a demo reel of my work. I edit a montage of 4-5 min on PPRO on my Win XP system and output to DVD. I took my originals (Beta SP and Mini DV) to a post house, and was told that the Betas have some noise on them. They gave me DV files (Quicktime) and they encoded my montage with Compressor. Some parts of the montage I found to be pretty poor. I’m very picky since I know the original was beautiful. I’m trying to figure out how to get the best DVD out of what I have. It seems to me that the weaker link is the encoding. I menaged to get similar results with the PPRO encoder. That tells me that there has to be a much better way to get a high quality results. One movie of mine came out as a commercial DVD and it looks fantastic. Granted they probably started with Digibeta and not Beta SP but isn’t there a way for me to get crisper, cleaner DVD? Mind you, if I view the DVD on a nicely calibrated TV set, it looks very good, but if the set is too bright, or has a “vivid” settings, it is rather poor looking. A crisp material still looks good on a crappy TV. Producers and directors will look at my reel on basic TV sets and get the wrong impression…
What would you suggest the best approach?
Thanks again
Eyal Gordin -
Hi Eyal. Didn’t mean to be so pompous and “educational” – apologies.
If you have good-looking Quicktime DV files you should be in good shape.
If not, I guess you need another post house that can do a better job on your source – if there’s a lot of noise in the Quicktime files, you may need to have the stuff re-encoded. You could try playing with Premiere filters, but whether it will look great to you / your clients in the end – and give a good representation of your cinematography … well maybe.
If they haven’t “graded” the material from the different shoots to make sure it all has the look you want, but it looks reasonably clean, you could try out PPro’s colour correction.
If you have good DV and are not impressed with the output from Compressor (I know you wouldn’t be alone), in the Windows world you could look at re-encoding yourself and playing with the encoder settings.
With a very short piece, you should be able to set a high data rate and get a good result from PPro, so long as you avoid field order problems. If you take time to experiment, I think you’ll end up with a good result.
If you wanted to go better than MainConcept, the PPro encoder, opinions vary but there’s a basic Cinema Craft software encoder / PPro plugin available for around $60, with a free trial version, which many people rate highly, and for around $500 – $600 there’s Canopus Procoder 2 which some people on here recommend. CinemaCraft also has a “top end” version at $2,000 … seems like a lot to me.
Given that you’re encoding a short piece, though, you should be able to get a good result direct from PPro ….
Good luck.
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Hey Mike,
You weren’t pompous at all! I apreciate the info a lot! A couple of questions. How do I avoid field order problem? I just set it for lower fields. As for the bit rate for a 4:15 min long. Are there set bitrates or it is simply experimenting?
Thanks again
EG
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