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AJA vs. Elgato
Hi all. I mostly use our AJAio to ingest Beta footage into our MacPros by FW. But the ‘codec’ input option I have to use, according to the presets in FCP, is Uncompressed Beta [composite]. Unless there’s another setting I could use for the AJA, this means that the footage comes in at an ungodly huge rate.
I’m not complaining, but in a practical sense, I had one project that was only supposed to end up on YouTube, so there was absolutely no need for footage that was uncompressed. Most recent project involves mixing DVCAM and this Beta footage, the end result which looks great but took over 4 hours for a 2 hr concert to compress to DVD format [m2v and aac in Compressor].
Question, among others: I have an Elgato analog converter. I can turn around the Beta deck’s BNC and XLR outs to RCA outs, patch to the converter, and output from it via USB into the Mac. That way I get footage with a data rate similar to DVCAM rather than super crazy size uncompressed. It’ll be easier to work with and I think look just as good as the DVCAM footage. To be frank, the beta footage doesn’t look as sharp or great color rendition as the DVCAM anyway, so not sure why I can’t just do it this way.
Thanks, Dave.
David J. Smolar
Preditor
Creative Video of Washington
creativevideo.com
inbetweenthings.com -
4 Replies
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Why not choose the dv or dv50 codec for capture? the io is capable of this, makre sure you have the latest drivers/firmware and you can capture composite, svideo or component.
Jeremy
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No codec is going to speed up converting to m2v but capturing to DVCPro50 will be much better than DV(25) and it might be a little fast encoding since it is 720×480 vs. the 720×486 of uncompressed, this eliminates the cropping step in the encode. DVCPro50 will be a lot smaller than uncompressed and it is a 4:2:2 codec so color space is good for going down to DVD.
I hope “aac” is a typo, DVD does not support that format, do you mean ac3? If you are encoding audio to aac, DVDSP will convert it back to PCM (uncompressed) when it builds the DVD.
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Gents, thanks so much! Yes, I meant ac3…sorry about that.
I think my 2-part question is:
a. Does AJAIo have any other preset other than uncompressed that would allow me to ingest Beta component? If so, what is the bit rate comparison? I’ve now found the AJA calculator so that’ll be a BIG help towards identifying the various bit rates. I believe the calculator — though there’s no preset for Uncompressed — lists Uncompressed capture with a bit rate anywhere from 36-45 MB/sec. Wow.
b. Could I just use the Elgato instead for ingesting Beta? Is it that lossy? Is it already lossy since it’s capturing thru USB?
David J. Smolar
Preditor
Creative Video of Washington
creativevideo.com
inbetweenthings.com -
A). Yes. Read my last post.
B). Why? You have the io, you just need a bit of an update to the drivers to get some more easy setups.
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