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Home Digitizing Betacam SP PAL tapes – lossless?
Hello,
I have about 100 Betacam SP PAL tapes that I need to digitize at the best possible quality that I can get with my home system. I am using a custom built editing PC; I have two Betacam decks at my disposal, a Sony UVW-1800 and a Sony J-10. The J-10 has a firewire out, which I connect directly to the computer and capture that way. Whereas the UVW I connect to an Analog-digital bridge (a canopus ADVC box) and go RCA in, firewire out. Both decks have given me the same results, which is a somewhat fuzzy image with varying amounts of track lines. When working with NTSC tapes the image is perfectly clear. I made sure to switch the J-10 to the PAL amount of scan lines and the problem persists.I understand that a home transfer is not going to net me as good a quality as a professional transfer, but I would like to understand why I cannot get as good a quality as my NTSC tapes. Do I need a special deck or converter or a different connection?
Thanks for any advice/help you can provide.
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4 Replies
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Hi Patrick,
If you are capturing through firewire, you are basically converting to DV, which is highly compressed.
If you want better quality, you will have to look at an AJA, or Blackmagic card that lets you take component in and spit out Prores or uncompressed.
The cheapest out there is the BM Intensity Pro ($200.00). https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensity/models/
Vince Becquiot
San Francisco Bay Area
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Hey Vince, thanks so much for the speedy reply, exactly the advice I needed.
Am I to understand that if I use a capture card and go component out into it, that I will be able to capture the PAL tapes at their fullest resolution with my Sony J-10 Beta player? A European or special deck is not needed to work with PAL? When I was going in via Firewire, the PAL tapes had a significantly more degraded image than the NTSC tapes, with scan lines and what seemed like bad tracking (even after adjusting the tracking.) This makes me think I need a special Beta deck to play these tapes, but it might have just been the DV signal(?) Make sense to you?
-Patrick
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As long as the deck supports PAL (and the tape isn’t SECAM), component out would be your best option in that case. Do buy from a source you can return the item to if it doesn’t work out.
Vince Becquiot
San Francisco Bay Area
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Thanks again Vince.
The only question that remains for me is why when I was trying capturing the NTSC tapes via firewire the image was much much clearer than with the PAL tapes (PAL tapes had scan lines and odd color). Is the Firewire connection the issue or would it be the player?
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