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Affordable Log Tape solution for live community TV studio ?
Hoping someone can help me here. We do a live to air TV show from a community based studio and we are looking for a fast, affordable way to get broadcast quality recording of our shows.
Right now we record to a DVD recorder via composite output but the quality is terrible. It’s also very unreliable and it’s a bastard to get into the system again to make copies for guests and other outlets.
The proposed solution is to bring in a laptop with Firewire 400 and take the feed from our old DV tape deck to an external HD.
Surely there must be a way to bypass the computer and just have a simple digital recorder that I can just bring home and plug straight into my editing system?
I think the studio has SDI out so could something like a hyperdeck shuffle work? or perhaps even a cheap camera with video or HDMI in so that I can record onto SD cards.Brett Ramsey
FCP/Mac hold out in a very PC environment. -
1 Reply
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Don’t understand the DVD problem, have you tried ripping the finished DVD using the free MPEG STREAMCLIP utility? This takes barely two minutes on any of my systems and generates nearly any file format you care to edit on, ready to go to the timeline or send to a DVD dubbing program.
MPEG 2 is actually not that awful a codec, but you need to feed the recorder a higher quality signal than the composite you’re doing, and you might try upping the bit rate or “speed” of recording the 1-hour mode.
What kind of switcher do you use for the show, and what sort of outputs does it have?
The proposed solution is to bring in a laptop with Firewire 400 and take the feed from our old DV tape deck to an external HD.
Surely there must be a way to bypass the computer and just have a simple digital recorder that I can just bring home and plug straight into my editing system?I’m understanding that your masters are on DV tapes. Well, keeping it all DV will save the d/a/d conversions and attendant quality drop from your current signal chain, I guess. But I wonder: Does the DV deck have a S-video or component video output? If so, attach the DVD recorder to that and burn a dub in realtime, again, at the high data rate, and the DVD dubs should look quite a bit better.
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