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SDi vs. Firewire out
I am using a Panasonic SD930 dvPro50 deck with firewire out and SDI out to capture footage to FCP.
So far I have been capturing into FCP via firewire. Would I get better qualtiy coming out of the deck via a Y Pb Pr cable and capturing through my AJA IO, the way I capture BetaSP footage? In other words, by capturing with the firewire out am I losing qualtiy?? I am edit some green screen footage and I don’t want to lose any signal.
Thanks.
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4 Replies
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You will not lose any quality because firewire is pure digital.
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If you are planning on doing any keying, color correction and/or compositing use SDI at 10 bit uncompressed. You will definitely be able to see the different when using those operators. If you are doing cuts only, firewire input is fine.
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Y Pb Pr and SDI are two different things. If your footage is at DVCPRO-50, it will stay that way regardless if you use SDI or Firewire (unless you convert the SDI stream to a less-compressed or un-compressed format – which won’t add any image information back, so it won’t look or key any better), however, if you go Y Pb Pr, then you are doing a D/A conversion and then an A/D conversion to capture so that would degrade the image. DVCPRO-50 is 4:2:2 and keys quite well, so it really doesn’t matter which way you get it in the system.
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I will capture with firewire and see what happpens. The iimage looks vey clean and the green screen was lit pretty evenly so it should be fine. I was talking to an editor friend and he was the one who told ne to come out of the Pannsonic desk via SDI rather than firewire so I was wondering if it really made any difference.
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