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Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy editing footage shot on digibeta in FCP – file format help?

  • editing footage shot on digibeta in FCP – file format help?

    Posted by Alex Campbell on March 26, 2009 at 9:25 pm

    i am about to edit a 20 minute training video using FCP 5.
    the footage was shot on digibeta, of which there is about 120 minutes worth of rushes.

    my intention is to edit the piece and author the dvd using dvd studio pro all in the one computer.

    i was going to hire a firewire tape deck to ingest all the footage into my computer via firewire, but posts on this site have led me to understand that this will cause a compression to DV. (How bad is DV compression? – is it ever used on tv for example?)
    i now plan to get the footage ingested at a duplication house.

    can anyone suggest a good quality format to work with and then render for the final product. the training video is not for broadcast and will only be watched on tv screens
    .

    Is working with uncompressed digibeta footage (10bit 4:2:2) in FCP 5 a bad idea without a RAID array?

    thanks to everyone
    from alex (relative newbie)

    mac pro
    2xquadcore 2.4
    10 Gb ram

    Stuart Simpson replied 17 years, 5 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Michael Sacci

    March 26, 2009 at 10:07 pm

    You can pull UC 10 bit SD from a FIrewire 800 drive that has 2 drives stripped okay but it is at its limit. If you are doing any composition of layers it is hard to pull through. You are looking at just under 200 GB of space.

    DV is not the end of the world but I would never use it if the footage was shoot on DBeta, why throw away all that infomatiion. Going from DV to DVD is not the best.

    One compromise is to use DVCPro50 instead of UC (50GB). It is much easier on the drives and it will hold up much better than DV(25). DVCPro50 is only 8-BIt though.

    If you have the footage captured as 10-Bit UC and it is taxing on your drives you could always convert the footage to DVCPro50. You can go down without a problem so this is the safest way to go.

  • Alan Okey

    March 27, 2009 at 1:22 am

    I didn’t realize they even made DigiBeta decks with Firewire… I thought they only had SDI and analog composite outputs.

  • Michael Sacci

    March 27, 2009 at 5:34 am

    Sony’s J30 (?) had firewire, they are play only decks, I didn’t know they were DV only, learn something everyday.

  • Stuart Simpson

    March 27, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    [Alan Okey] “I didn’t realize they even made DigiBeta decks with Firewire… I thought they only had SDI and analog composite outputs.”

    Yeah the J30 will downconvert and output DV over firewire.

    -Simmie
    6 MacPros – Kona 3 & Kona LH
    1 G5s – Kona LH
    xbox360, Wii, PSP, PS3
    https://www.speak.co.uk

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