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DVCPro50 vs Digital Beta
Over the past year our Digital Beta deck has been down as much as it’s been up. Meanwhile the prospect of replacing it outright has been unsavory as well since your only choices are to buy anoher used one or a new Sony deck with all the funky flavors. We shoot on DVCPro50 and love it, but I’ve always shied away from it as a mastering format because the DB has done so well for us for the past 8 years.
Here’s what I know: both are 4:2:2, but the DB is less compressed- that said, I can’t really see the difference even on a large monitor.
Am I fooling myself?
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2 Replies
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Both DV50 and DigiBeta are 4:2:2 and lightly compressed. DB is 10bit, whereas DV50 are 8bit. DB is slightly less compressed. As to whether you can see the difference on broadcast is very debateable.
DV50 has the advantage that you can edit it native, which saves hard disc costs, and you don’t need an SDI card.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Mark,
About a year and a half ago I was faced with the same decision. Spend $35K on digibeta, or about $13K on DVCPRO-50. After talking with several people, I took a chance and went with DVCPRO-50 for my main SD mastering deck. After I got the deck, I did some really geeky difference matte tests (like Marco Solario does on his codec sight) to test stuff that had previously been mastered to digibeta and compared the same thing mastered to DV50. There is about a 10% difference in favor of digibeta. You can do the math and see that the difference in cost is far greater. I also compared footage that had originated on film, been mastered to digibeta and loaded into my system at 10-bit uncompressed (via SDI) with the same footage output to DV50 and loaded back into the system. I put the stuff that had gone through the DV50 deck into an after effects timeline on top of the footage that had not gone through the deck and turned the top layer off and on to see if I could visually see a difference. I had to blow the stuff up about 800% to see any pixels moving around.
So the short answer is, go with DV50, you’ll never see the difference. Digibeta may be slightly less compressed, but the algorithm that it uses is aging, whereas the DV50 codec is newer and apparently more effecient.
Chris Tomberlin
OutPost PicturesChris Tomberlin
Editor/Compositor/Owner
OutPost Pictures
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