beta deck is a beta deck?

ok, if im making station dubs of a tv spot from FCP. is a high-end $50,000 sony betaSP deck going to produce a better quality end product than a lower-end $7,000 sony betaSP deck?

ive never side-by-sided the two extremes...

Same quality. Decks have different options, but they all record the same quality.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

50 000$....man Beta sp deck dont worth that anymore...you can find sp deck for 1500$

shane - what you doin up so late? folks rarely reply here after about midnight...

and thanks, thats kinda what i figured...

now that the days of betaSP are nearing an end, i cant believe nobody ever produced a simple "in/out" beta SP player recorder. i guess the uvw1800 was close, but it still has a half dozen features id never use. and at $8000 its still ridiculously overpriced for my needs.

imagine if you will... betaSP with a firewire IO, play/record, timecode, audio meters. DONE. $3700 - wouldnt that have just sold like M.F.-ing HOTCAKES to all of us NLE folks?!?!?!

Quote
50 000$....man Beta sp deck dont worth that anymore

yeah, but they still make 'em

Since :

Quote

now that the days of betaSP are nearing an end

Why somebody would look at a new Beta SP deck. If its only for a couple of dubs you should look for a used SP Deck, those decks are tank, so for 1500$ on the ''semi-long run'' your gonna be in a win situation ($).
[sfbay.craigslist.org]

i dont even know why were even discussing beta anymore... why these stations cant implement an electronic injest procedure escapes me...???...???

i guess they need to justify all those $50k decks they bought 2 years ago... ; )

Shane,
Did you ever compare the VERY NOISY signal from an UVW to the clean output of a BVW?
I bet you did not, or you would not say this.

No, they are NOT the same. Besides options, the more expensive decks have a BETTER image.
(if they are calibrated properly, but sadly the old decks are trying to die)


Bouke

BVW-75, the peak of SP deck for near 3000$ check this out :

[www.broadcaststore.com]

The last time time someone mentioned sending out a BetaSP, i looked at him funny... Don't they take digital betas, Wayne?

And yea, betacams aren't the same quality. Digital formats are a lot more consistent (an expensive deck records the exact same data to tape as the cheaper models), in the analog world, you get what you pay for.



www.strypesinpost.com

Bouke, I did not. I didn't know there was that big of a difference. We captured from and output to UVWs all the time. I guess our standards were lax.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

> The last time time someone mentioned sending out a BetaSP, i looked at him funny... Don't they
> take digital betas, Wayne?

Lots of local stations still use Betacam SP, not DigiBeta. I edit commercials for a production house where I also have to do tape outputs. Betas. Doesn't mean we don't do an agency DigiBeta master as well as one for archival, though.


www.derekmok.com

Shame on you Shane, image quality of a BVW can be gorgeous...
But sadly, they are dying and repairs are expensive. (capacitors are all leaking...)

How old are you? It wasn't that long ago that they were industry standard...

As for the BVW 75 mentioned, a BVW 70 would actually be better. The 75 was the workhorse in sports as it was an editing deck with slomo capablity. So they were used as iso recorders for instant slomo playback of highlights. A 75 has probably spent his life in a broadcast truck getting lots of abuse...
Slomo is not needed in a deck anymore, but make head replacements way more expensive.
(Perhaps you can put non-slomo heads in a 75, dunno, never checked...)

Bouke

I am 38. But, until recently, I was an offline editor. So quality of the footage coming in wasn't really an issue, as we captured at AVR3s or AVR 12...or 20:1. It looked like crap anyway. My eye was always on the story, and not the quality.

Now things are different. But now I don't deal with betasp.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Just curious, but I usually think that DV25 has similar or slightly better quality than BetaSPs...



www.strypesinpost.com

422 vs 420 or 411 makes a difference.
Specially in NTSC if you have to go to DVD that makes a HUGE difference. (Not really that much of an issue in Pal...)

Dropouts look different on SP than on Dv, and noise is different too.
But i prefer GOOD betaSP over DV any day. But that is at a price...

(I don't get to choose the shooting format, i only do post. And i master to digibeta for the last 8 years or so. Actually i've got only one customer left that shoots SP, as her old Ikegami just won't die and still produces great images)

Bouke
www.videotoolshed.com

Quote
bouke
422 vs 420 or 411 makes a difference.
Specially in NTSC if you have to go to DVD that makes a HUGE difference

if we are limited to mpeg 2 as sd dvd format, whats the difference?
I mean if i record dv 411 then 422 and 420 wouldn't effect anything after capture. Its gonna stay 411 right?

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

>(Not really that much of an issue in Pal...)

Lol. PAL is really a lot simpler a world to live in than NTSC. For one, in SD, we don't have to deal with the difference in frame sizes. In film and HD workflows, no pulldowns to worry about.

Although, I kinda read that the effective quality on Beta SP is 3:1:1, making keying quite a chore. Though, I swear i can tell if a spot was mastered on Beta SP- there's a certain kind of noise (could be the UVWs you mentioned), wherereas digital formats are usually much cleaner (with the exception of having acquired footage on cheap DV gear).



www.strypesinpost.com

>Its gonna stay 411 right?

The DVD standards for Mpeg2 specify 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, at 8 bits. A 4:1:1 format may look worse than 4:2:0 when you compress it to DVD, since the patterns of the sampled chroma pixels are different (but I haven't tested this out yet).



www.strypesinpost.com

So should the footage from my dvx100b be treated as or upresed to a 420 or 422 color space to meet these requirements in the codec?
Is there a quality jump if its treated that way?

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

>Is there a quality jump if its treated that way?

You could telecine it to 35mm, then transfer that to DPX before you work...

Otherwise, if you shot DV NTSC, you already only have a chroma subsampling of 4:1:1/ 8 bit depth. Bumping it up will present no difference in quality than what you already have.



www.strypesinpost.com

that is not what i have HEARD (keep in mind, i only work a bit in NTSC, and only from stuff i convert from 24P to NTSC...)

The stories i've heard is that material that is ingested in 4:2:2 with a deck that can do the conversion nicely looks way better on DVD than DV ingested 4:1:1 stuff.
I would definitly do a test if you have the gear to ingest over component or SDI.

btw, we DO have pulldown in Pal. 24 is NOT the same as 25, and i had to write my own pulldown remover to go from 24@25 back to 24, as there did not exist one already..

Last but not least, analogue betacam DEFINITLY will look way better than DV. (when recorded and ingested with proper cams/decks, UVW's don't count!!!)
Just press the 'blue only' button on your monitor and you'll see the difference.
But that is no longer an issue. Analogue beta is dying fast....

Bouke
www.videotoolshed.com

>btw, we DO have pulldown in Pal.

True. There's one- where a field is repeated every 12 frames. But it's not half as common as the 24pa/24p shoots.

>The stories i've heard is that material that is ingested in 4:2:2 with a deck that can do
>the conversion nicely looks way better on DVD than DV ingested 4:1:1 stuff.

I've heard about that too (and I'm in a PAL world where DV is 4:2:0), but I could never find the right setup to do a reliable test. I did once work in a setup where some guys adopted a workflow of capturing DV in DV50 over component signals via a Kona. It's not a very orthodox practice, and I do feel that native firewire captures looked better (didn't have time to run comparisons, though). An SDI workflow may present a different result, as the signal goes through hardware chroma smoothing without an analog conversion.

>analogue betacam DEFINITLY will look way better than DV.

I can't draw a comparison on injested footage, there's too much variables within the different cameras- DV cameras are rarely built as a serious broadcast acquisition tool, and Betacam SPs was a serious broadcast format. The CCDs and lenses (as well as the way it is shot and lit), will present probably the bigger difference between the 2 makes of cameras.

Can't believe we're discussing beta formats though... it's entering the history books. Here's an article if anyone wants to know more.

[www.dvcentral.org]



www.strypesinpost.com