Slightly OT/ BetaSP and Digibeta side by side

[Devin Crane]

“In my opinion, the show needs to look as good as humanly possible in my NLE long before broadcast when the guy with the checkbook is sitting beside me signing off on it! I’d prefer not be explaining compression and 300 lines, how once to air it will all smooth out and so on!”

Then go for it spend the extra if money isn’t an issue, we’ve been working with both IMX and beta and the IMX is so much better, can’t tell the difference between it and UC captured straight from the camera. I’m sure Digibeta is similar.

[Bret Williams]

I’m sorry there aren’t 39 lines of image being hidden by overscan. When you view an image in underscan you are seeing the full 486. The extra scanlines are used for other data like tc, burst, sync, etc and a lot of other stuff I don’t worry about because it’s all from analog edit land. To quote Wikipedia:

…Each frame consists of a total of 525 scanlines, of which 486 make up the visible raster. The remainder (the vertical blanking interval) are used for synchronization and vertical retrace, and can contain other data such as closed captioning and vertical interval timecode.

[C david Miller]

Like someone told me one day, we (videographer/editors) are our worst critics and it keeps us from getting past the technical aspects of this business….. and getting the job done sooner.

Dave

[Devin Crane]

Lines of resolution don’t refer to how many horizontal pixels there are from top to bottom but how much detail your camera or recorder actually displays. It has more to do with the amount of detail within the 525 lines and is measured with a resolution chart nothing to do with how many lines go up from top to bottom. In the same sense Beta Sp is only able to display somewhere around 360 lines of resolution, Analog TV and RF signals are 336 TVL/ph: 4.2 MHz luma bandwidth, DV runs somewhere around 500.

[Aaron Neitz]

Exactly Devin. It’s a “realistic” resolution – not the exact amount of pixels/lines.

BetaSp is 340 lines of realistic resolution. Even if your gear puts out 525 lines of data.

[Misha Aranyshev]

Digibeta is cleaner, better colors and less compression artifacting comparing to IMX. Digibeta is 10 bits per channel. Imx is 8 bit.

[Devin Crane]

Have you ever compared the 2? I haven’t but have compared IMX against Uncompressed 8 and 10bit and couldn’t see a difference on the scope or to the naked eye on Broadcast Monitors.

Digibeta is good but is an older tech than IMX. IMX is MPeg 2, better formulated than Digibeta which is an older technology that uses DCT the same formula for DV but higher bandwidth. Head to head 8bit Uncompressed vs 8bit IMX we could not tell the difference from the naked eye or even on the scope. The great thing about IMX is that you can edit natively without having to uncompress and recompress again and save a bunch of space on our hard drives.

Also I’ve heard that Digibeta Decks require a lot of maintenance, we have over 3000 hours on our Deck and have had no problems with very little dropouts. Sony is still selling the Digibeta Decks but if you notice they aren’t marketing them anymore. I know people swear by 10bit but who broadcasts in 10bit? What DVD player uses 10bit? What internet codec is in 10bit?