Capturing Uncompressed Footage (Beta or higher)

[Graeme Nattress]

BetaSP is a compressed analogue format. It’s not digital, has no codec, and hence cannot be edited natively. To capture BetaSP, a device will convert the YPbPr analogue component video to digital signals. You then then choose to compress those digital signals or not. I think all capture cards do a minimum compression of throwing away half of the chroma resolution, ie 4:2:2. To leave the rest of the data uncompressed, is what people normally refer to as uncompressed, but as you can see, some compression has already been applied.

Being a compressed analogue format, it is not perfect quality to begin with. It has noise, low chroma resolution and about 3/4 of the luma resolution of a digital SD format. However, if you compress the digital version of it, you will be adding digital artifacts upon top of the BetaSP analogue artifacts, and hence may degrade the image further. That’s why people often capture it “uncompressed”, even though it does not inherently have the quality to warrant uncompressed.

You need reasonably fast drives for uncompressed SD, but usually not a massive RAID like you need for HD!

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[David Roth weiss]

Graeme,

Although I’ve been using 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed for a long time, many recent posts have convinced me that QT Photo JPEG at 75% is considered my many now as the best and most efficient choice of codecs to use in a sitiuation such as the one Bob has now brought up for discussion. What’s your feeling?

David

[Graeme Nattress]

I’m in total agreement. But for some silly reason, Apple don’t enable it for RT. You can hack the RT enabler and make it work, but we shouldn’t have to!

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[David Roth weiss]

[Graeme Nattress] “You can hack the RT enabler and make it work, but we shouldn’t have to!”

Graeme,

I’ll bet this and Media Mangler both work in the rumoured Final Cut Extreme, for the rumoured price of $10,000.

At least they had better work…

DRW

[Graeme Nattress]

Yes, you pay $10,000 and the only difference is they’ve hacked an enabler file for you. Lovely 😉

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Tom Brooks]

Bob,
See my answer to your earlier post. To that I’d add that, with my setup, I can capture Beta to either DVCPro50 or to 8-bit uncompressed. They both look very good and each has its advantages. The DV50 format uses a good compression method that keeps a lot of the original quality but doesn’t take a huge amount of drive space to capture. It’s not for purists, perhaps, but a good solution in the real world. I have no experience with the PhotoJPEG 75% codec, but I have a lot of confidence in those who advocate it. Good luck putting it all together. If you come close to having a setup in mind, post it and you’ll get good feedback.
-Tom

Final Cut Studio, FCP 5.0.4, After Effects 6.5 Pro, Quicktime 7.0.4, G5 Quad 2.5, Kona-LHe V1.2, 4.5 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7800-GT, G-RAID 1TB FW800.

[Bret Williams]

Ok, I’ve got to admit, I’ve never hear of either “compressed analog format” or “analog artifacts.” I was of the understanding that compression is related only to digital formats, and that artifacts are actually the result of said compression. Wouldn’t anaog by it’s very nature neither uncompressed nor compressed, but simply “analog?”

What would be an uncompressed analog format? 1″? 2″? 3/4″ The latter 2 are definitely worse than BetaSP, but I’ve heard that 1″ is better in some aspects, but not all.

[David Roth weiss]

Bret,

Just for the record… There was a time when everyone used to think 1″ was terrific, but believe it or not, its a composite video format. Today, when I look at my 1″ masters, which in their day were as good as you get, they really suck. The limitations of NTSC composite video are just so great that even the best sources look noisy and degraded when compared with modern component and digital video.

DRW

[Bret Williams]

Are you sure they were all composite? I thought maybe the later versions were called C or something like that. So then, Betacam was basically the best analog got as a component format?

My first intership was at a PBS affiliate where they were cutting all the promos from 1″ to 1″. But then they all went onto a betacam stack reel – which was my job to put together – for broadcast. We had 2 sets of 7 stack reels. Mon-Sunday. Every two weeks each betacam would get recorded over, and as far as I can remember we reused the same reels for 3 months. They held up just fine.

I remember watching the telethons begging for support money and thinking… “you know, if everybody didn’t have a freakin $50,000 BVW-50 in the office to preview tapes, maybe they wouldn’t need a telethon.” There must’ve been 25+ BVWs in that place. ??? Needless to say I didn’t donate!

[Graeme Nattress]

There is no uncompressed analogue format, and analogue compression is different to digital compression. Some compression such as interlace (can be thought of as comression) is used by both analogue and digital video.

Generally analogue compression comes in reducing bandwidths (ie resolution), dynamic range (mostly lost in the form of noise) and encoding / decoding artifacts when the video is turned composite. There are also artifacts that come from the tape based nature, timebase stuff etc. All of the above introduce artifacts.

I guess what I’m getting at is that people have this misaprehension that BetaSP is this practically perfect analogue quality format because people capture it “uncompressed” into their NLE. In reality, it’s the DV of the tape world – good, but compressed.

It’s generally very hard to rate video format’s qualities, but with modern composite decoding, I still like the look of quad 2″ above all. I think 1″ is too noisey, and BetaSP too soft.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP