Best way FCP on IMAC to Beta SP UVW-1800

[Bret Williams]

What kind of video are you working with? 4:3 SD DV video? or 16:9 video?

You wouldn’t do any panning and scanning to make a 16:9 video. That would show the whole 16:9 frame. You would pan and scan a 16:9 or HD video to put it within the confines of SD 4:3.

If you’re working with DV, you could output to a DV deck, which would retain your video exactly as you created it without any loss or analog conversion, THEN dub it from a DV deck to BetaSP via a component connection. A dub house could do the dub for you.

Or if you have a video card like a kona card you could simply output to a betacam deck via component

[Richard Sanchez]

You really need a Mac Pro or G5 for this. Even if you use an AJA IO interface, I doubt the internal harddrive of an IMAC could handle uncompressed 8-bit. Nevermind the fact that it’s a very bad idea to use your bootdrive to capture to. You could edit material on an IMAC that was captured on a more robust system, but as far as being able to capture or layback, it’s far too limited a system.

Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Jason Stephens]

My project is a DVCPRO HD 720P taken from 2 Varicams. I edited the entire feature on my IMAC 24″ with upgraded RAM and VIDEO card. The project was taken via hard drive to a Davinci 2K Plus for color correct/grade, then uprezed to 1080P and final out put on a D5 master.

I have a UVW-1800 and for some foreign market deliverables will be providing Beta SP. I can go straight from my master for this but would have to go to a rental house and pay for something I was hoping to do from home. I have the final project in several different formats/codecs, etc. I can go straight to a canupus converter and S-VHS into my UVW-1800 with unbalanced audio through a Mackie mixer. (This will be for M&E audio only) Didn’t think this would be the best. Would an AJA card yield anything better?

I didn’t want to have to invest in anything too expensive as I am not delivering out to Beta SP too often (I usually went out from a firewire DVCPRO deck, which worked fine for local cable, but I don’t have that deck anymore. I figure with channels going HD after the first of the year my UVW-1800 may become obsolete. All of my former Beta SP projects came from DVCPRO (25mbs) and were shot in 4:3. For local cable commercial stuff.

I don’t know why I get so much flack for my IMAC. I love editing on it…. plus I easily lug it around to show off the film in HD, used it at a convention, etc etc.

Thanks for any help.
Jason

UnknwnProd
http://www.UnknownProductions.com

[Richard Sanchez]

That’s the beauty of the IMAC, is it’s portability. It’s curse is, it’s not very expandable. The reason you need a macpro to lay back to Beta SP, is that you need your storage on it’s own bus, and you need your IO on it’s own bus. If you have a Sata RAID attached to a pci bus, and a Kona card on it’s own pci bus , or even an IO (which is firewire based) they will have their own dedicated bus to provide the throughput necessary to layoff to betacam sp.

The IMAC will only give you firewire, and it will share the same bus, which means your hard drives and io will be fighting for that throughput and it just won’t work. If not, you could export your footage to a self contained quicktime and take it to a post house that can lay it off for you, but I don’t believe you’re going to be able to do it with an IMAC.

As you mentioned, you could do it with a Kona card. Mind you, not a Kona 3, as that is digital only and won’t connect directly to a UVW-1800 unless you get an SDI to Component decoder, which is yet another expense. You also cannot put a Kona 3 in an IMAC, so your only IO option is the IOHD, but you’re still left with the issue of throughput from your hard drives.

I strongly recommend you take it to a house to downconvert from the D5 master, especially since it was color corrected on a Da Vinci. You’ve already spent significant money making this look nice, and all these workarounds you’re considered would tend to defeat the purpose of all that.

Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Jason Stephens]

Thanks for the info.

Jason

UnknwnProd
http://www.UnknownProductions.com