[Fxholt]

Remember the decks record differently thant the Varicam- those numbers refer to the varicam!
I use the 1200A deck, and I can tell you you can fit 64 minutes of 1080 DVCPROHD on the yellow label “126L” tapes, but NOT in the Varicam. Check the varicam forum for more detailed answer.
Also, in a brilliant move, they stopped making the small red label tapes that did fit the 1200A deck, that fit 94 mins of HD- the AJ-HP92ELG. Someone might still have a stash of these somewhere. So unless they’ve reintroduced something else, you can no longer output more than an hour of DVCPRO HD with the 1200A.
The 1700 obviously takes the bigger tapes . . .

[Fxholt]

aren’t you only violating copyright if you make money off of it? How can making a different software file be a violation? I wonder because everyone who edits surely does this for home movies etc.

[Fxholt]

Thanks for all your responses. I have tried everything with the machinery available to me here and right now the only thing that works is still for me to go composite into a third machine which has an SDI out, and from there to the DV deck. So it seems to me that either the DV deck ref in or composite in ports must have damage or VHS is just unstable?
Oh well.

[Fxholt]

Could that be your playback offset? You can change them in the device control preset editor.
What you might try is, use the TC reader filter in final cut to make a blank video clip with a timecode window on it, then render this and play it out to tape. Then you could just shuttle through the tape and see if there is a consistent offset between the actual tape timecode and the timecode window rendered on the video, and calibrate your system to match that.

[Fxholt]

You don’t need to worry, your quicktime size is not exactly the issue. It’s the size of the resulting MPEG2 that counts. For example, I have a 94 minute HD quictkime that is over SIX HUNDRED GB and when I export it to MPEG 2 it is still around 4.3 GB and thus fits on one DVD.
What software are you using to do the conversion?

[Fxholt]

Don’t letterbox it in final cut. DVDSP has 16×9 as an option. Use that. That will also save you time. And just export in your native frame rate.

[Fxholt]

Still didnt work. Does this mean that the ref-in port on the DV deck could be damaged?

[Fxholt]

Thanks for the response! Unfortunately, this DV deck only has sync IN, so I can’t loop the reference back out. The two dekcs do have S-VHS in/out but same prob. Is a digital frame sync expensive?
This seems like the simplest task for an HD edit suite, but this is the one thing I can’t get to work!
Before when I have had to dub VHS to DV or digitize it, I’ve gone composite into a DVD recorder which has SDI out, and then in preview mode, I can do anything with it since it’s going out SDI, but theres a ten second delay and it seems ridiculous to do it that way, since gaps in the VHS knock it out of preview mode and make TC breaks.
Anything else I could try?
thanks
A

[Fxholt]

You could consider rendering out individual quicktimes of certain effects, for example, if you have several speed changes and color corrections and mattes all on one shot, make a quicktime of the clip with just the speed change first, then replace the clip with the quicktime, so that you only have to render the color correction, etc.

I had that happen when rendering credits on a giant HD sequence. It was just too much, the credits were a giant photoshop doc that was being rendered as a scroll, and an opacity change, and our dual G5 with 4 GB ram would not do it. So I exported a quicktime of the scrolling, and applied the opacity effect to that quicktime.

Render files are wierd: in copying and pasting clips from one sequence to another, I’ve seen the speed change shots become completely different shots. So I’ve been conditioned to export quicktimes of such shots.