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D2 / what is composite digital
We’re doing some archiving for a director. He’s got a load of D2 tapes and is worried about getting the best quality from them.
Quandry how to load these: there’s hookups for SDI on the decks, but it doesn’t seem anyone rents the deck with the optional board installed. From what I’m seeing reading about “composite digital” is it’s still a composite analog transport stream to/from the deck, but it’s simply being recorded in a digital format on tape? So SDI is kinda useless, might as well load analog?
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6 Replies
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Yep. Just load analog. The optional board is just an a/d converter.
Believe it or not, CBS still wants prime time shows delivered in this format. We just output to digibeta and dubbed it for them.
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CBS STILL uses D2? Wow. I remember having to deliver D2 to ABC, but they switched not too long ago. I guess CBS has a lot invested. You’d think with the ratings they are getting, and the revenue because of it, they’d replace the format.
Might be waiting for the FULL HD conversion.
D2 is an odd format. Analog digital…however that worked. I never understood it myself.
Shane
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[Shane Ross] “CBS STILL uses D2?”
Yep. Had to deliver a prime time show to them early this year on it.
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The D2 aimed to replace the 1 inch machines.
People really wanted Components Digital (everybody was working with Betacam) but D5 was toooo expensive.
rafael -
[Dave LaRonde] “An SDI connection may be handy thing to have in this instanc”
But SDI is Components and you can not go from Composite Digital to Components Digital directly. You need to go analog to filter the Luma and Chroma. It would be a very costly SDI interface.
Rafael -
No, D1 won’t play in a D2 machine. The D2 format is throroughly composite; it basically samples the composite signal (y & q separately, if I remember correctly) and records those samples to tape.
There was talk at one point of sony providing an add-in card which did allow you to record d1 component on a D2 tape using the D2 recorder. I believe that the card had all of the D1 circuitry and it simply bypassed all the original video-processing hardware of the D2 and went straight to the tape, essentially using the D2 transport as a data-drive. That would have been cool; I know a facility I worked at really wanted something like that, but I don’t know if was just vaporware or a real product.
The D2’s were very popular not simply because they were cheaper than the D5’s and Sony’s D1’s, but because facility owners could ‘go digital’ without having to replace existing composite gear. D2 switchers, routers, dve’s etc were available, though I don’t think they were very popular. DigiBeta came along together with SDI and made the switch to digital component relatively painless.
I think the theory behind the SDI card for the D2 machines was to allow facilities that had switched to component digital to integrate their legacy d2 machines.
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