[Mike Smith]

Your BIOS can read available physical RAM on start-up, but that doesn’t mean that Windows XP can use it or make it available to apps to use, until you enable the /3Gb switch.

[Mike Smith]

https://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

https://www.gehrytechnologies.com/catia/catia/catia_windows_large_memory.htm

Proceed with caution!

[Mike Smith]

Hi Willie

The Athlon 3500+, that’s one of the new 64bit ones with SSE2 support, is it? I don’t know whether that works with PPro 2 or not – no doubt you’ve checked it out.

So by video card do you mean capture card, or graphics accelerator? And what would you want the capture card to do, that a firewire card doesn’t – are you thinking broadcast, or vhs, or hd .. ?

[Mike Smith]

Why not add a submix mono track in the mixer, route your track to it, and adjust your left / right balance in way you usually do ..?

[Mike Smith]

I guess answers are slow here because it’s not all that clear what you want.

Of course there’s a lot of ways to create strong 3D-look material in 5.5, using 3D layers, maybe using effect / simulation / shatter and adjusting shape / extrusion depth (and switching off gravity and the two explosion forces ..)

[Mike Smith]

Beta SP, huh .. maybe time to invest in new shooting kit? With excellent DVCAM, DVCPro and HDV on the market, XDXCAM HD around the corner, all that dosh to continue to edit uncompressed analogue-sourced material for DVD distribution seems like a wasted opportunity to modernise.

While the tech spec on top end Beta SP is of course broadcast standard the PVW/UVW ranges are not – and even at the BVW end, it’s arguable how much benefit your DVD viewers will see for your extra spend.

Then you could get a really fast twin opteron (e.g. from Boxx), a fast RAID, and have change from $7,000 …

Or if you have masses of archive / stock Beta SP that you just have to use, you could look at an Canopus Edius SP system – lightning HDV (and DVCAM) edit, and component in …. or of course add a Decklink or Aja capture card.

[Mike Smith]

If you are thinking higher-res completion, maybe have a peek at
< a href= "https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=3&postid=860658&pview=t#head" target="_top"> https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=3&postid=860658&pview=t#head

Or https://www.cineform.com/ for some alternate workflow / low budget high quality ideas …

[Mike Smith]

If this is too patronising then my apologies.

This https://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_6_4/feature-article-enhanced-widescreen-november-99.html might help.

Or this ( a bit more recent!)
https://www.audioholics.com/techtips/specsformats/widescreenletterboxpanscan.php

Or this
https://www.adamwilt.com/TechDiffs/FieldsAndFrames.html

Or https://www.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/conversion/#conversion_table

Some of this stuff of course is only for the full-on tecchie or hard-core sleep deprived …

[Mike Smith]

I guess it depends a lot on what you want to finish with.

Your super-16mm original will allow for finishing as HDTV /Hi Def video, via a digi transfer to 2K or another film resolution format, or as a standard definition master on NTSC (or PAL).

Widescreen never really made much of an impact in NTSC land, and there are few NTSC widescreen-capable monitors or TVs available. Most folks finish up with a letterboxed video stream for their widescreen – maybe one of the reasons HDTV has been particularly attractive in NTSC lands ?

So while DigiBeta isn’t of itself limiting you, your NTSC choice is a tricky one. You’d need to know whether your telecine was squeezed anamorphically (to allow you some kind of low-res path back to film in the end) or letterboxed.

And you’d want to know whether the NTSC tape is your final online medium, or whether you are going to go back with a cut negative for a 2K or HDTV scan, for a final master …

These things will influence your choice. Otherwise, as Jeremy points out, NTSC Digibeta uses 720×486 pixels, and if you want to widescreen this then 864×468 gives you the unsqueezed dimensions. But as Shane indicated, theres’ not a lot of widescreen NTSC support out there in the market, if the final delivery is to be an NTSC master …

Hope this helped more than it feels like it does!

BTW, what film stock(s) were you on, and how does the telecine look?

[Mike Smith]

Digibeta records a 720 x 486 / 720×576 (PAL) grid, and uses this to record and replay true 4:3 or true 16:9.

It does this by using different “pixel aspect ratios” – wider pixels for wider screen giving a different screen shape, but no extra resolution.

If fed with an optically squeezed image via camera or via a super-16 image correctly telecined then it will record and replay “true” 16:9 – though I think super 16 is strictly 1.66:1 screen aspect ratio (to 16:9’s 1.78:1), so will have its top and bottom clipped slightly or have small black bars left and right.

In the HD arena, HDCAM (and HDV) do a similar thing to Digibeta – using a 1440 x1080 pixel grid and wide pixels to generate a 1920×1080 image.