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Beta Edit
Hi,
I generally capture from a Sony DSR 45 deck through Final Cut, as most of the time im editing from DV or mini DV tapes. However, I’ve got an edit coming up that will be Beta tapes. What equipment am I going to need to log and capture for the edit? If its not going to cost an arm and a leg then id like to buy the gear so I have time to play around with it, but don’t see many of these edits coming up, so hiring the kit for a few extra days might be a better way around it?
Also, the edit has to be put onto a beta tape for playback at an event, what would be the best way to do this? Can I print to beta tape with the same gear or should I take my online to a bigger facility?
Any advice would be really appreciated, thanks.
M
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7 Replies
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Marcus,
Two options, take a hard drive to a post house and have them capture it, or rent a Beta deck. Probably $250-$350 per day.
Have a wonderful day.
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You need more than just a Beta deck, you need an analog I/O. Something like the AJA IoLA that has component in’s and out’s. I have the IoLA and it works great for my analog Beta deck. You would need it for both the input and output. I also use a Kona3 for digital but you don’t need that.
Question, how are you monitoring your FCP video? You have to have some sort of I/O to feed an NTSC Monitor?
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
Oopps! Yes, I forgot to mention some kind of Io. Even if you get it captured you’ll need some hardware to play 8 bit in real time. Unless of course you have it captured to DV.
Have a wonderful day.
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The Blackmagic DeckLink SP ($595) is specifically designed to capture Beatacam footage.
You can capture from 10b Unc to DV.
DV50 or ProRess would be a good solution. No need special hardware to play it in RT for printing back to video.
Rafael -
The Sony J3 machines play all flavours of beta and have an SDI output which can feed straight into a cheap Decklink with SDI I/O. The J series are play only but as you didn’t specify what type of beta tapes you will be ingesting, this machine covers all your capturing requirements.
Some J machines also have a firewire interface so you can capture as DV without an I/O card. I wouldn’t recommend it as DV codec is a backward step in quality, but it is the cheap option. Your final can then be played out to your DVCam deck.
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Hey folks,
What happened to the seemingly once-common practice of capturing Beta by passing it E-E through a DVCAM machine? True, you end up in the DV codec. But it seems to me a lot of folks avoided buying analog I/O devices by doing this. A typical setup would employ a Sony DSR-1500A DVCAM VTR. You hook the Beta to it via component analog. The 1500A converts the video to DV and connects to the computer via FireWire. You control the Beta deck via RS-422. You output the same way–through the 1500A. Not sure if this works with a DSR-45. It’s not my cup of tea because I have a lot of Beta-SP footage to deal with. But for the occasional foray into analog…
-TomFinal Cut Pro 6.0.4, Mac OS-X 10.5.5, Quicktime 7.5.5, Adobe Prod Prem CS4, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V6, 8.5GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT 256MB, G-RAID 2x1TB FW800, 6TB RAID-5 (Enhance E8-ML, Highpoint 2322), Panasonic HVX-200P P2. Also MBP 17″ Core 2 Duo 2.5, 4GB, GeForce 8600M GT 512MB.
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Hi Tom,
Sure you can, although no RS-422 control.
This is the cheapest option but the one which will yields the lower quality too.
Is a mistake thinking that because Betacam and DV offer a similar picture quality is not worth to use a better codec to digitize it. The better the codec, the better the picture when digitizing an analog source video or audio.
Rafael
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