Digitizing BetaCam SP

[Michael Gissing]

[John Heagy] “We digitized 1600 hrs from HDCam last year and archived it all to LTO. We now have 1600 hrs of easily restorable ProRes that will link flawlessly to projects.”

Is that faster than recapturing from tape?

[David Roth weiss]

[Shane Ross] “No. FCP X will not cause FCP 7 …or FCP 6…or previous versions…to no longer work. “

You obviously haven’t heard about the self-destruct backdoor feature. Bruce takes a big dump and all previous versions vaporize. I read about it on MacRumor and the FCPX Forum, so it must be true.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Cody Walters]

Sounds like LTO is something I should consider for keeping copies of my digitized footage. You’re right, it will be quite an effort digitizing hundreds of hours of footage. For now I’ll probably purchase a few external RAID drives and keep the footage there.

Cody Walters
JW Studio LLC
Houston Video Production
Houston Wedding Videos

Final Cut Studio 3
Adobe CS5 Master Suite
Panasonic HVX-200
Canon 7D

[Cody Walters]

Thanks for the advice David. Depending on how quickly this project needs to move will decide whether I purchase now or later.

Cody Walters
JW Studio LLC
Houston Video Production
Houston Wedding Videos

Final Cut Studio 3
Adobe CS5 Master Suite
Panasonic HVX-200
Canon 7D

[John Heagy]

[Michael Gissing] “Is that faster than recapturing from tape?”

A single fibre attached LTO-4 restores at 75MB/sec. Capturing HD tape to ProRes is 20MB/sec and only 6MB/sec for SD…. so yes.

John Heagy

[Michael Gissing]

[John Heagy] “A single fibre attached LTO-4 restores at 75MB/sec. Capturing HD tape to ProRes is 20MB/sec and only 6MB/sec for SD…. so yes.”

Ah thanks for that info John.

[Andrew Rendell]

A couple of little things concerning analogue recordings:

Always use the component connections (don’t even think about composite if you have a regard for quality) and make sure that the cable lengths are the same for all 3 and use a good quality B&B generator for Gen Lock.

Be sure to clean the tape path regularly and keep the VTR serviced – Beta SP does not have data correction (not being digital) so the slightest imperfection in the tape surface causes drop outs.

[Patrice Freymond]

If not mistaken there is some “data” correction since the 2800 has a TBC (time base corrector) that includes a drop out compensator, just like most professional analogue vtrs of yesteryears…

Now the 2800 never was the top of the line and a BVW 75 would have better TBC performance if my memory serves me well… but this is a while ago though.

This will not fix all dropouts and you may want to invest in something like Digital Heaven’s drop out compensation filter.

hope this helps,

Patrice Freymond

Senior editor
FCP Certified Trainer

patrice@monteur.tv

[Andrew Rendell]

Well, yes, but all the drop out compensator does is simply repeat the line information from the last good line until it gets a good signal again. We used to get a lot of minor dropouts which would be only a block of lines in one field, so you could replace them using the other field of that frame – a very quick and easy fix but one that you have to do manually.

As I recall, the BVW series were better engineered all round than the cheaper models, but the main difference between them and the PVWs was slightly worse signal-to-noise when making recordings and no audio channels 3 and 4, so although I’d avoid the UVW series for this kind of thing, I reckon that the difference between a BVW and PVW deck for it would be pretty minimal (unless you need audio tracks 3&4).

[John Jennings]

Hi, novice here. Equipment:
– MacPro, 12 core, 32gb RAM
– Sony BetaCam/SP PVW-2800
– AJA Pro IO LA
– FCS X

Cannot “see” the Sony from FCS.

– Have updated AJA firmware, appears to look fine in AJA Control Panel

Setup works on an older MacPro with FCS 7.

Any suggestions?

thanks, John