-
BetaSP into DV project thru Decklink Extreme—codec?
Awrite. Was on a 3 camera shoot (all Sony DVCams, DSR300’s & my DSR500) when my tape transport wonked out. Told director could be back up and running real quick and record component out to BetaSP, and then capture and give to him and should be better than DV anyway.
(Note: don’t get hung on this part. Belkin makes a 23 pin component break out cable that’ll go from the 23 pin on back of the camera to component in on a deck with that capability)
So, set up, recorded bars and checked play back, looked good, and record last 20 minutes of shoot to BetaSP. Brand new tape, low hrs on deck. Play back looks good on set.
But—digged using BM NTSC DV codec, and dropped the drive off to him and he calls and says it’s ‘blocky in solid color areas’, (specifically blue) and looks ‘noisy’ and not quite right.
Went and had a look, and while I think he’s being a bit picky, yeah, it’s there. Side by sided with same shot from native DV and is noticable. He’s wanting me to pay for a component dub from BetaSP to DV so it’ll match the other footage. Nahh, that ain’t right, I’m thinkin’.
So, back I race, do a test of same shot, captured with every codec, BM 8 bit, BM 10 bit, BM DV NTSC, and BM JPEG. Zoomed in 400% and sorta surprised nothing really made any difference except JPEG looked really bad.
So, any suggestions? Would field dominance have anything to do with it? I’m running OSX 10.4.7 with latest BM drivers on Dual G5 2.5 if it matters and FCP 5.0.4.
Thanks for any ideas.
p2
-
1 Reply
-
Hi,
If I’ve understood you correctly, you originally shot on DVCams and then captured the DV via Firewire to the Mac.
When the tape transport broke down, you took the component output of the camera and recorded to a Betacam SP deck. You then used a DeckLink Extreme to capture from the Betacam SP deck to the Mac using a Blackmagic DV NTSC easy setup in Final Cut Pro.
Is that correct?
If so, I would expect the DV movie aquired from the Betacam SP deck to be inferior to the DV captured via Firewire directly from the camera or via Firewire from a DV deck.
This is because you have first recorded to an analog deck which has introduced some analog noise and some quality loss when slightly compressed on the BetacamSP tape. That BetacamSP material has then been captured to a DV timeline in Final Cut Pro and so the usual lossy compression has occurred. The intermediate step of recording to the analog deck will have caused additional quality loss compared with a direct DV capture via Firewire.
An uncompressed 8 or 10 bit capture from the Betacam SP deck would defintely produce superior results. But if you then have to recompress it to DV, I expect the same blockiness will occur as that is the nature of the DV codec.
If you ever had to do this again, it would be preferable to record directly from the camera’s component outputs to the DeckLink Extreme card. That would still introduce some analog noise but would bypass the tape compression in the Betacam SP deck.
Finally the codecs used by the Blackmagic easy setups are the Apple uncompressed and DV codecs. Blackmagic codecs are no longer used.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up