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Best (and inexpensively) way to edit from a Digibeta tape
I have a 16min. Digibeta video I need to re-edit. I want to do this in Premiere Pro 1.5.
I don’t have a component input card.
Is transferring to miniDV the best I can do or is there a relatively cheap HD format I can edit within Premiere Pro?
Is the Cineform HD codec worth the $500?
What formats do houses do from Digibeta? I guess I would give them a firewire hard drive to save the converted file.
The intended output would be DVD, but it could also be submitted to film festivals.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Dave
3GHz HT PC, 2GB Ram, Invidia 6600, NEC 20WMGX2 HDTV -
7 Replies
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Your biggest issue is getting the data from the tape to a digital file. I don’t recommend DV since it is more compressed than DigiBeta (5:1 versus 2:1), although it depends on the needs of your client.
If you could get it transfered to a Quicktime file with the MJPEG format (quality of 95%) you would get reduce the file size about 2/3 over uncompressed, and (in my opinion) it looks pretty good … much better than DV.
Good Luck,
Robert -
If the first suggestion doesn’t work for you how about using a DV camera as a pass-through. Connect the digibeta deck to the DV camers and the camera to the workstation. This should convert the Digibeta to DV.
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Won’t that have the same 5:1 compression problem as just having the transfer house put the movie on a DV tape for me so I can transfer it to my PC with my camera?
Dave
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Yes, it would. Are you using Adobe Premiere? What version? I’m not sure Premiere will handle Digibeta, so you may not have a choice but to compress it. Check your documentation and the Adobe website.
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I’m using Premiere Pro 1.5. and yes I know I have to compress. I was looking for the best possible format that I can edit on my PC. It looks like a Quicktime file might be the best I can do.
Dave
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I would recommend that you call some tape transfer / duplication / media services houses and see what they can do for you.
Whenever we get a tape in a format we don’t have a deck for, I just send it to our local transfer house and they capture a quicktime file compressed with the Blackmagic codec from the tape. It is an uncompressed format with a free codec you can use in Premiere.
This transfer house has final cut for their video suite, but the codec and file itself are cross-platform, so we can use it right away in Premiere. 16 minutes of footage will be 25 GB, so you will have to send them a firewire drive to put it on. I had to buy Macdrive for $50 so that I could read a Mac formatted firewire drive on my PC edit station.
To get the best quality, they use SDI output from the Digibeta deck into a Blackmagic SDI capture card.
You mentioned that you might want to submit the final product to film festivals. If that means you want to output back on to Digibeta when you are done, you can just export a Blackmagic Quicktime file and send it back to the transfer house for them to output.
The Cineform HD codec is great, but you don’t really need it for this little footage. Also, Digibeta is an SD format, not HD. You can use the Cineform HD codec for SD work, we do it all the time, but there’s no need to purchase it for a small project like this. (Note: We use the Prospect HD codec, I’m not sure if the other Cineform codec flavours do SD).
Good luck!
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Thanks Andy for the advise. This seems to be a great way to do what I need. I just need to find a house that has the decklink card, right? Can you give me an idea how much this transfer should cost? Do you know of a house in the San Diego area?
Dave
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