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Which Beta SP deck to rent?
I’m going to be editing a short drama that was shot on 35mm and then telecine’d to Beta SP. I have a Kona LH card in my G5. The local rental house in Vancouver rents several Beta SP decks, ranging in rental price from $100 a day to $450 a day. I’m trying to figure out why I shouldn’t just rent the cheapest one, the Sony BVW22. The decks (all Sony), from least expensive to most expensive are BVW22, UVW1600, UVW1800, PVW2600, PVW2800, BVW75.
This’ll be my first time capturing through my Kona card so I’m doing my best to not look like an idiot. I’m hoping someone can suggest the right deck for me.
Thanks for your help.
Jim
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3 Replies
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Of the decks you listed, I believe only the BVW-75 has 4 channel audio, if thats important to you. It also has on-board TBC controls.
The BVW-75 was considered the top of the line in its day, and is what most broadcast users use.
The PVW-2800 and UVW-1800 were more aimed at industrial users..they only have 2 channel audio (but you may encounter some that have a 3rd party modification to work with 4 channels). The 2800 has TBC controls, however the 1800 requires an external TBC controller.The 1600 and 2600 are playback only. The 1600 does not have a proper RS-422 machine control port, if I remember correctly…only RS-232..so machine control might be a problem. (not 100% sure about this). I dont know anything about the 22.
If I had my pick, I would get the 75 or the 2800. They are solid machines.
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I agree with John,
I would add if you only need playback for digitizing (I assume you are doing an offline edit where content is foremost not image quality) then the pvw-2600 will work.
The 2600 is a player only and the 2800 and 75, 1800 are recorder/players.
BVW 22 from my memory was primarily aimed as an in office player machine (ie for client reviews from betacam sp sources). Paramount to all machines is the vtr transport response times as certain models were designed for digitizing and use in an editing environment where as others are strictly playback not ideally suited for editing or digitizing work. Keep this in mind as you could end up spending much more time capturing from a slower machine than one which was intended for the proper use.
A cheap rental does not translate into inexpensive if you end up spending more labor time than budgeted and as a result you personally end up “eating the loss”.
The 1800 is my last choice as it is quite noisy but it is widely used for a offline digitizing source machine where image quality does not matter for the off line edit.
Tony Salgado
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Everything from the PVW seriw up has a drop out compensator built in. The best machine for critical and very clean BetaSP capture is probably the DVW-A500 which is a D-Beta deck that plays back Beta SP tape. You could probably also rent a JH3 deck, which is aso very clean, but do not go for th UVW series, no drop out compensators built in.
David
Peace and Love 🙂
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