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Betacam-Aja-FCP and viceversa
Hi all,
maybe somebody can give me some direction with these 2 particular projects, i don’t have much experience dealing with betacam sp, aja’s, and fcp all together.This company is shooting commercials, so…the first one is being shot in 35mm and is gonna be transfered to betacamsp (they want to put it on a hard disk…hope that happens, it will save me some confusion at the moment of capturing.) The final result is gonna be betacam sp for broadcasting (that’s what the stations ask for over here, no digital, no hd, no nothing) Still don’t know if it’s gonna be 4:3 or 16:9. This particular project is gonna get some rotoscoping done, i think tha visual effects guy is figuring out what specifications he needs to ask prior the transfer.
So, for this case, what would the setup situation in fcp be??? what codec would be the best to use to edit and for exporting back to betacam?
The other case is a commercial shot in HD, 29.97fps, 1920×1080, this one is gonna get some chroma done. As far as the capture and timeline and stuff in FCP i’m clear, i’ve worked with that before (the P2). But then, this timeline has to go to Betacam Sp, again, for broadcast, and that’s when it gets confusing. The guy that used to work here told me that once edited the sequence in HD, it has to be exported as quicktime with the animation preset, and then back to a NTSC timelime to FCP to export to betacam sp, is this the way to do it or is there any other way, one that would make it lose the least resolution possible?
any help will help.
andrea.FCP 6
AJA KONA LH 5.1
MacPro Quad/core Intel Xeon 2.8GHZ, 4GB Ram -
2 Replies
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You say AJA, but not what AJA, there are a bunch of them. Some of them like the Kona 3s and LHs, do hardware HD to SD conversion. Some, like the AJA LA and LD and Kona Ss, are SD-only.
I edited most of my Beta-SP in Uncompressed 8bit, although if you’re short of disk space or data-rate DV50 works (and looks pretty good). -
It’s the Aja LH 5.1. I had read somewhere too about editing in a timeline setup on uncompressed 8bit and then “…making certain that you do not allow FCP to change the settings to match the footage. Now, you’ll need to resize every shot depending on if want to go letterboxed, anamorphic or centercut.” Would that be the way to go?
i did a comparison using this method and the other one i mentioned before, exporting a quicktime with an animation preset and reimporting in a NTSC timeline to export to the Betacam, it looks better in the sense that it keeps the composition of the shot but i’m sure there’s A LOT of quality lost in this whole process.any thoughts?
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