Graeme Nattress
Forum Replies Created
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There is no uncompressed analogue format, and analogue compression is different to digital compression. Some compression such as interlace (can be thought of as comression) is used by both analogue and digital video.
Generally analogue compression comes in reducing bandwidths (ie resolution), dynamic range (mostly lost in the form of noise) and encoding / decoding artifacts when the video is turned composite. There are also artifacts that come from the tape based nature, timebase stuff etc. All of the above introduce artifacts.
I guess what I’m getting at is that people have this misaprehension that BetaSP is this practically perfect analogue quality format because people capture it “uncompressed” into their NLE. In reality, it’s the DV of the tape world – good, but compressed.
It’s generally very hard to rate video format’s qualities, but with modern composite decoding, I still like the look of quad 2″ above all. I think 1″ is too noisey, and BetaSP too soft.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Yes, you pay $10,000 and the only difference is they’ve hacked an enabler file for you. Lovely 😉
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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But there’ll be no word on price until monday morning….
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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I’m in total agreement. But for some silly reason, Apple don’t enable it for RT. You can hack the RT enabler and make it work, but we shouldn’t have to!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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BetaSP is a compressed analogue format. It’s not digital, has no codec, and hence cannot be edited natively. To capture BetaSP, a device will convert the YPbPr analogue component video to digital signals. You then then choose to compress those digital signals or not. I think all capture cards do a minimum compression of throwing away half of the chroma resolution, ie 4:2:2. To leave the rest of the data uncompressed, is what people normally refer to as uncompressed, but as you can see, some compression has already been applied.
Being a compressed analogue format, it is not perfect quality to begin with. It has noise, low chroma resolution and about 3/4 of the luma resolution of a digital SD format. However, if you compress the digital version of it, you will be adding digital artifacts upon top of the BetaSP analogue artifacts, and hence may degrade the image further. That’s why people often capture it “uncompressed”, even though it does not inherently have the quality to warrant uncompressed.
You need reasonably fast drives for uncompressed SD, but usually not a massive RAID like you need for HD!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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The price mentioned is not “the price”. I can assure you that we have not leaked the price to anyone. I know I haven’t!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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The price mentioned was mentioned by the presenters of the radio show and was neither confirmed nor denied by Ted. IMR do not have a “scoop” on the price for the RED camera. Nobody outside the core RED team knows the price, until we decide to announce that information. We have not, as I write, announced that information.
That said, you can read Jim’s comments on the price, and where we see the camera in the marketplace, and come to your own conclusion, or wait until NAB….
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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But editing is a technical based art. You can’t just go around calling things what they’re not because it’s easier, or commonly (incorrectly)used. Incorrect terminology leads to confusion, and when printed in a technical, engineering product spec sheet, makes it look like whoever wrote it didn’t know what on earth they are talking about. We use special words in video for a reason, so that we can communicate and share complex ideas without ambiguity. Even Apple are coming around to this, now putting a note in the FCP render dialogue box, correctly referring to YCbCr, but noting, for those who’ve been using the incorrect terminology, people refer to it ast YUV.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Tony, I don’t blame you! All the people I know from Matrox don’t work there any more anyway. But yes, sounds like a very useful product, but I’m guessing it needs special drivers? Be very curious as to how gets around some of the issues FCP has with it’s full screen output too.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP