[Michael Gerrity]

Thanks! I think you’re right.

I absolutely need to have the VTR setting on if I’m passing VHS footage through the TBC. It’s just a little weird that it needs to be on, cause if I bypass the TBC, the VHS footage looks fine on a good tape. However, if that same tape goes through the TBC and VTR is off, then it actually looks worse than the source.

[Michael Gerrity]

Brilliant! Thanks again!

[Michael Gerrity]

Thank you so much Shane for your time, expertise, and clarification.

I had the J-30 connected directly to the computer via Firewire and that had sketchy connectivity issues, and this is where I was experiencing quality issues. Otherwise, I’m going component out from the deck to the AJA. The AJA only has one firewire port for connecting to the computer.

So far it looks like I am indeed getting the best results via the component capture. I just find it hard to believe/weird that the J-30 would have firewire out and that wouldn’t be the optimal way to capture the footage. Do you know if Avid or proprietary Sony software would have been better suited to capture via Firewire from the J-30? Was it just for easy viewing and control from a computer?

You’ve been very helpful, and already given me plenty of your time, so no need to respond, but I’m curious why I can alter the capture settings, including the compressor it’s using, if it’s totally inadvisable? I know it’s Pro software, so more options are always preferable, but why include options for things you wouldn’t or shouldn’t use? Were these settings more so available for capturing offline footage for editing? So you could capture all of your raw footage at a significantly lower quality?

[Michael Gerrity]

Maybe you’ve misunderstood, otherwise I want to clarify that what I’m doing is actually wrong – but as I said, in the past I’ve had no issues:

Inside the Audio/Video Settings dialogue, you can set your capture preset. There are also tabs to view, edit, and create capture presets. I can select the AJA Io NTSC preset, duplicate it, and edit the settings to change the compressor from 8-Bit Uncompressed to ProRes 422. The digitizer is still set to “ProIO 8-Bit Uncompressed” but the compressor is set to ProRes 422.

I’ll do a test, but with these settings I haven’t noticed any issues, and analog captures aren’t the problem, it’s digital captures from my Sony J-30.

I’ve made the changes above with the standard DV-NTSC preset as well. For all of my DV decks, the only digitizer option that shows up is “DV Video,” I leave this default, but I change the compressor from DV/DVCPRO – NTSC to ProRes 422. For MiniDV/DVCPro/DVCAM I’ve had no issues. However, when I have the Sony J-30 DigiBeta deck connected, the digitizer says, “J-30” not DV Video like every other firewire deck.

But maybe I can’t capture ProRes via firewire, but what if I have the same problem if I set the compressor to 8-Bit Uncompressed, or DV-NTSC? Maybe I won’t have that problem, but is my only other alternative to take component out from the DigitBeta and capture via the AJA for the best image? What, if any, capture preset can I use for capturing DigiBeta via firewire?

FWIW my deck does not have SDI out. There is a model of the J-30 that has SDI, but this one doesn’t.

[Michael Gerrity]

Thanks Shane, I’ll give your insight a shot. However, right now my biggest issue is that I can’t get the J-30 to show up in FCP anymore…this has happened before, I’ve tried multiple combinations of plugging/unplugging shutting down and powering on and I can’t seem to find the magic combination to get it to work. It’s not a control issue, the Mac doesn’t even seem to be recognizing the deck. If the deck is recognized, I don’t have any problems controlling it via FireWire.

Since there’s no FCP preset for DigiBeta, I adjusted the built in DV NTSC capture preset and changed the compressor from DV to ProRes 422. Is this inadvisable? I’ve been doing this for my MiniDV captures and I haven’t noticed a loss in quality. Could the J-30 be the issue? I notice that in the capture preset dialog there’s a drop down for “Digitizer” which would be the J-30, and then I select the compressor, which I set to ProRes 422. Is it possible the J-30’s data stream is compressed? Could you only get the full fidelity of DigiBeta through analog playback and not through the data stream? But again, that doesn’t seem right, cause the Capture preview looks great, but the captured file does not.

I did a DigiBeta tape over a year ago on this J-30, I had connectivity issues, but I didn’t notice any quality issues. My client was a little upset because he said our file was significantly noisier than his DVD transfer from 10 years ago. To make a long story short, my version was noticeably sharper and more vibrant than his DVD, the DVD compression just smoothed out all of the noise on his copy. Point being, I at least THOUGHT my workflow for DigiBeta was working at one point, but now that doesn’t appear to be the case. Or maybe something’s happened to the computer since.

I made the same adjustment to my AJA capture settings, using ProRes 422 as my compressor as opposed to 8-Bit Uncompressed, and I haven’t noticed a quality issue, but I’ll have to do a test comparing the two. Unfortunately, it looks like one of my co-workers may have accidentally deleted my direct Firewire capture over the weekend, but I did do an analog capture to ProRes and as far as I can tell, this looks much better than the direct Firewire capture.