[Mikelinton]

We’ve been using NEC drives for about 2 years… haven’t had a failure (knock on wood), and have always had extremely reliable burns from it, with great compatiblity with players (which is also impart due to the Verbatim media we use exclusively).

My 2 cents – stick with the NEC.

[Mikelinton]

Well, there aren’t any options for what you want to record to the tape in the BMD Deck Control software… It’s pretty straight forward – you load your clip into the software, tell it the time code you want the video ‘put’ to, it cue’s the tape, pre-rolls, and dumps your audio and video down to the deck.

In Sony Vegas, you can select A1 A2 V – all 3 are selected, but still no audio… again, the DeckLink IS playing the audio back, but somewhere along the way the UVW isn’t engaging the audio channels. So, you are right – it does seem to be that the deck isn’t being told (or isn’t listening) to record A1 and A2. I tried it on a tape that had video and audio on it, and it inserted video, but did nothing with the audio.

As I mentioned, I’ve dumped to BetaSX via SDI on the same system, using the same methods, and it worked fine (although the audio was embedded in the SDI). The DeckLink outputs SDI, component, XLR and SPDIF audio (for monitoring) at at the same time, regardless of which combination you are actually recording.

[Mikelinton]

Hmm… I’ve been through all the menus, and everything looks correct. Unless someone can point me to a specific setting somewhere, I can’t see anything that appears to be set wrong. The deck has very low hours on it, I purchased it from a company I used to work for and it was used primarily for capture… although, I had the deck in for service several months back for a tape transport issue – I wonder if it’s possible that has something to do with it? I can’t recall ever doing an insert edit prior to that repair (we also used the deck primarily for playback to capture, until recently)…

[Mikelinton]

Unfortunately, I don’t have a controller to test with… or a different deck (although, I’ve done inserts with an SX deck with the same setup through SDI, without any issues).

As far as I know, when printing from the Decklink it is inserting V A1 A2 automatically. There are no options anywhere to change it that I’m aware of.

I’ve talked to DeckLink tech support, and we traced it back and the card itself seems to be doing its job. I thought the serial connector might be faulty or something, but BMD basically said ‘if it is controlling the deck, its working.’ It’s got me stumped…

[Mikelinton]

That’s an odd one… try a different firewire cable perhaps, failing that see if you can manually record the clip without using advanced capture. Not sure why it won’t read in the software…

[Mikelinton]

Is the timecode broken on the tape? i.e. did you remove the tape from the camera at some point, and put it back in and continue recording? If the time code gets re-set at some point, it can throw the batch capture off.

[Mikelinton]

I’ve never noticed any sync issues with Vegas, except when capturing (sometimes the audio preview drifts when capturing from DV, but it’s not a real issue).

Also, Vegas is setup out of the box at 29.97 fps (which is the correct NTSC frame rate). This might be your issue… if you are creating your music, or mixing at 30fps and your video is 29.97, the slight difference will cause things to drift in and out over time.

We’ve mixed dozens of projects in Vegas and outside of Vegas in ProTools, and brought the audio back in with no sync issues…

[Mikelinton]

I’ve done plenty of stuff for broadcast with Vegas, and it turns out great if you know how to properly setup your graphics and output. Also, the on-air graphics you are seeing from the station aren’t dubbed, and are likely all 10-bit digital as opposed to component… As well, make sure you understand how Vegas’ SRGB color space works. There are some articles around describing how to work with it properly.

The issue ‘lines’ you are describing sound to me like a field issue. Vegas natively runs at 720×480 (which is standard for DV, and DVD). Some systems run at 720×486 (which is the standard for non-DV). You can easily flip Vegas into 720×486 by changing your project settings. If you are getting someone else to output your files to BetaSP, this is likely your issue. What might be happening is, your 480 footage is being scaled vertically by 6 lines which will throw all the fields out of wack. Double check the settings on the system you are using for output, make sure you match your settings in Vegas.

We render to uncompressed AVI all the time to move footage between different programs, and never have an issue.

[Mikelinton]

In CSI everything is warmed up… it’s chronic sunset on that show. The colors are all shifted to a much warmer tone, and then they seem to throw a sunset grad filter on a lot of the shots to make the sky even more orange (or do it in post).

Use the Vegas color corrector and shift your mid-tones to the orange spectrum. You’ll see your sky should change with it. You might need to tweak the highlights a bit, depending on the exposure of your sky (it won’t work on an overcast shot – has to be a blue sky).

[Mikelinton]

Well. All in all, it’s good… now that I’ve tested it more, and played a bit – it’s not as bad as I had originally thought. But, still not as good as I would’ve hoped for.

I think at the end-of-the-day, if you keep your graphics/animations as uncompressed AVIs and then render them down at the last print-to-tape phase, it will be great. But, if you render your graphics to YUV and then again in the print-to-tape phase, it certainly isn’t pretty. And that’s easy enough to have happen – especially if your graphics aren’t quite legal, and you’re using Vegas to change levels etc. for output to BetaCAM you’ll be re-rendering it again.

The BMD 10 Bit Codec doesn’t ADD anything – i.e. you put in 8bit, you’re gonna essentially get 8bit (because Vegas only processes in 8bit).

Also, one of my earlier comments isn’t quite accurate – you CAN’T print to tape using the BMD 10bit codec from Vegas. You can render it to a file, then use the BMD Control Panel tool to print it to tape. You can pre-render your timeline to it, no problem. But you can’t print it. Vegas only gives you the option of using templates that use the Sony YUV Codec at 29.97 fps. Anything else, it ignores.

Colors also play a role in how good the output is. Our company logo is green, for example – so we often use that color for slates etc. And the YUV codec seems to do a lousy job rendering it… it’s essentially a color gradient that ‘rotates’ around the screen slowly as the program info is displayed. I rendered the animation of the gradient background to a file, then overlay the program text on top, then had to render it again to print to tape. The 2nd pass through the YUV codec just destroyed it. The first pass was OK – you could see some banding in it, but it wasn’t horrific (DV creates some too). Wasn’t as smooth as DV or uncompressed, but still acceptable. Did the same thing with a blue, and it looks fine – hardly any difference between DV, YUV, or uncompressed. Rendering the same background to uncompressed, doing the text overlay, then rendering to YUV produced much cleaner results (basically the same as the first pass through the YUV codec).

And from the video files I’ve processed to death, render them to YUV, BMD, DV – and the end of the day, video files look fine. That is – anything that had banding in YUV, also had it with the BMD Codec, and the DV codec – just different degrees, and different places. It