Can I ONLINE-EDIT in Broadcast Quality with FCP?

Hi there,

I am new to FCP. I would like to ask if I can use it to output an online broadcast quality TV commercial onto betacam master ready for airing, considering the set-up I have below:

FCP Ver 7.0.3
MacPro
Mac OS Ver 10.6.5
Processor 2.8 GHz Quad-ore Intel Xeon
Memory 3GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Graphics ATI Radeon HD5770

Sony Betacam SP UVW-1800

The material will be shot in redcam.
I already have installed the redcam codec I found in their website. I also have tested if the FCP can read redcam sample files and it could when I imported the redcam mov into the project bin.

Your help is very much appreciated. Thank you.

broomsfly

Yes you absolutely can Online with your system however you will need a card or some sort of device like and AJA I/O to get the footage from the computer to the UVW 1800

FCP is very capable of this. You are missing two vital pieces of equipment, however...a capture card to output the video from the computer to the deck, and a broadcast monitor to properly judge the quality of your image. And you will need a monitor capable of HD and SD, as your material is HD, and your output is SD.

But you also need to really bone up on the RED workflow. Working with the proxy file is not the best workflow...

www.reduser.net has many whitepapers on the workflows that are currently working the best.

And if you haven't onlined for broadcast before, I suggest you either hire someone who has, or learn from them how to do it. It is a full profession in it's own right.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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

Yes you can. I've churned out SD and HD spots for all sorts of broadcast. I'd be curious as to why uvw or betacam for that matter. Don't the network use digital beta at least?



www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah...RED to BetaSP? That's quite a step down.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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

A step down is right. Betacam SP was popular way back in the 80s. It has stopped being the in thing since shoulder pads went out of fashion.



www.strypesinpost.com

We're still delivering in the neighborhood of 100 BetaSP's per year. The format simply will not die and most of the stations don't want DigiBeta. Weird I know.

And back to the original post, FCP has been broadcast quality since day one. As Shane notes, you'll need the capture card to output to and control the UVW-1800. The UVW is the only piece of equipment still left in my shop from the first day we opened 10 years ago....

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Interesting. It's been years since I saw a tape roll in that thing. With beta sp, shooting on red probably won't make much of a difference from shooting on dv50 or even dvcprohd.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yes.

Best wishes,

Harry.

Beta SP? Eeeek

In the UK we haven't used Beta SP since DVCAM and DVCpro50 romped it home and bit off a large portion of Digibeta too!

The nice thing about this small oddly formed island I live on (and the rest of Europe and Russia) is that HD is REALLY taking off everywhere and I maybe get 1 or 2 SD projects a year now with everything else in HD or higher. YAY for progress. Boo for overcompressed HD MPEG LongGop with dead pixels and sensor glitches!



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

We have a library of hundreds and hundreds of SP tapes and a system for ingesting them, but haven't accessed a single one for, wow, at least seven years I guess. It's getting hard to even rent an SP deck here now. I think the stations that missed the Digibeta boat are waiting for the digital realm to settle before they re-invest nationally. Big stations move slowly on tech.

But also, yes - I've been finishing for broadcast on FCP since V1.

> We have a library of hundreds and hundreds of SP tapes and a system for ingesting them,
> but haven't accessed a single one for, wow, at least seven years I guess.

Imagine their headache when they start having to do tapeless archives of those suckers.


www.derekmok.com

Yeah the station that's at already did a transfer of their thousands of 4:3 news archive SPs to 16:9 Digibeta. Now only a few years later they're shooting tapeless.

Wow, never noticed how much that sounds like 'topless'..

Depends on the size of the cups.. I mean cards.



www.strypesinpost.com

"With beta sp, shooting on red probably won't make much of a difference from shooting on dv50 or even dvcprohd."

oh, what you shoot on makes a lot of difference, no matter where you end up.

we're always telling that to people who wonder why their DV home move doesn't look as good as a Hollywood trailer in youtube.
(i mean their both H264 aren't they?)

also you have the Progressive vs Interlaced issue.

What's a "tape"? I have been tapeless for 2 years. Every outlet that requests Beta / DigiBeta / DVCProHD from us, I simply convince them that a digital file takes no quality hit on a tape layoff and rather than charging them for a FedEx overnight, I can send it to them immediately for free...all I need is an email address / FTP info. Thank god for ProRes and Aspera / DigiDelivery / FTP. It also allows me to work from home a lot more. Technology rocks. I can only imagine what's coming.

Which reminds me...I have a Kona LHe with the breakout box sitting in it's box in my cabinet - anyone wanna buy it???

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

>oh, what you shoot on makes a lot of difference, no matter where you end up.

I didn't look at it this way, although you are more likely going to see the difference on a big screen. With RED, you work with a superior color space. However, resolution-wise, Beta sp throws away resolution- 3:1:1 chroma subsampling, SD frame size. If you lose enough resolution on your final codec, you probably wont notice quality/resolution issues from a less than pristine source (aside from the interlace/progressive look). Beta SP is probably barely good enough for you to tell. With RED, if you shot 4k without a lot of resizing, a half premium debayer will pretty much suffice for this case.



www.strypesinpost.com

I concur about the lingering preponderance of the Beta-SP videotape format. In fact, a substantial program that I'm editing will soon ship out for DVD replication by a major firm. I proposed delivering digital files; but both the client and the replicator request that the program be delivered on Beta-SP.

Also, I have firsthand experience with television stations in my top-10 market. While their news field acquisition has shifted to digital (P2 cards), videotape is still alive and well at these stations, particularly with commercials, PSAs and info-mercials. Their large archival news libraries exist on U-matic, Beta-SP and one-inch formats. Digital Betacam tends to be a rarity. This format was/is in limited use by creative services departments rather than general broadcast operations.

In recent years, stations purchased large video servers for storage and editing of their news material. In my experience, the video quality that emerges from them is marginal due to the relatively high compression (lower bit-rate) that is chosen by engineers to maximize data storage.

I do wonder whether the migration from videotape to digital files will cause important content to be lost to history. Digital files tend to be ephemeral, while content stored on a videotape is more apt to be preserved. This same thinking extends to family photographs. Which is more likely to be around a generation from now -- photographic prints in a scrapbook or digital snapshots?

Quote

I do wonder whether the migration from videotape to digital files will cause important content to be lost to history. Digital files tend to be ephemeral, while content stored on a videotape is more apt to be preserved.

I still get the "Tape is tangible" crowd harping on - but people forget that tape has a finite life - as does DVD/CD/Blu-ray/HDD/SSD etc. the big issue with tape (as Jude pointed out) is the ability to play the tapes!

At least with digital file backup you are unlikely not to be able to access in the future; as there are 100s of connectivity options out there (even old serial and SCSI connectors from yesteryear) and certainly USB and FireWire (when finally superseded) will not be abandoned completely by cheap hardware converter manufacturers.

However if anyone reading this thread has archive on analogue tape - You should absolutely NOT use Beta SP as archive of anything - we used to have a 6000 tape Beta SP library kept in pristine environment yet the amount of issues and the inherent drop out of the Beta SP format. It was an awful decision to used Beta SP due to slight cost difference to Digi.

My suggestion to you Carolyn, is to cut all the RED to an 1920x1080 ProRes 422 HQ HD broadcast spec programme.

Then downconvert a copy of the master to an NTSC 4:3 Pan & Scan and 16:9 letterbox versions (as required) to Beta SP (for the crazy people at the station) so you will always have an excellent HD Master to come back to when the client realises that they are stuck in the mid 1980s!

Lastly - if you are delivering Beta SP - make sure you get the best possible quality tape stock that should help minimise drop-out to something like 3 drop outs per minute.

Also get your Beta SP Deck serviced and the heads cleaned before you master!



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

The analogy --- silver-on-paper photo : digital photo file :: videotape : digital video file --- won't fly. A silver-on-paper photo bears the undisguised picture. If it fades a bit or some flecks pop off, the picture mostly survives. Both the videotape and the digital files bear/contain coded pictures. What lies nearby in the code does not generally lie nearby in the picture, and codes themselves are colorless, colors being represented as field values or as numbers. It's really the fact of being coded that makes the videotape and the digital file farther from the image and thereby inherently less durable.

Movie films can disintegrate and be completely lost. Being uncoded doesn't save them then. The sheer physical durability of the medium matters, but much more for coded images. If you like the physical durability of videotape then transfer your digital files to tape and have the same physical durability.

Also the code itself needs to be durable, that is, permanent -- not misunderstood or fiddled with by future readers of the videotape or digital file. Some videotape codes might be more permanent, because more important stuff is stored in them, than some digital video codes, but they're all over-engineered and therefore vulnerable. DCI's latching onto JPEG 2000 with CIE X,Y,Z is a conscious effort to make a permanent "video" (although they won't call it that) code.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

It depends on which way you look at it. One thing we know is that digital is here to stay, because its benefits outweigh the cons.

There are some misconceptions as well, we're not talking about storing on single hard drives. You can store your data on LTO tapes. Admitedly, hardly any directors I know of do that, as they do not want to pay more merely for a more secure form of storage. It was easier years ago when it was digital beta. The quality is lossless and it's secure, also, it was one of the only ways you could keep your shows in high quality.

I'm not sure where you come from, JAS, but I've only come across one network that takes dv for broadcast. Everyone else takes at least d-beta for programs. Not that that scenario doesn't exist. D-beta did come under competition unlike its predecessor, with many people preferring to shoot on dv50 or dv because it was cheaper and didn't consume as much storage, while the folks with beta sp sent their decks for repairs whenever it was spoilt. It's just that it's become a little of a forgotten format here, like hi8 tapes and to some degree dv (most guys I know only use dv for casting, although that may change as casting directors start using the iPhone)



www.strypesinpost.com

Shane,

Can you possibly offer a link to the white papers you mentioned on www.reduser.net?

I've searched that site and found tons of interesting threads, but white papers that distilled the best-practices for various scenarios would be awesome.

Thanks,
Tom

Thank you very much for all your comments and suggestions guys :-)

Dang it Tom, I can't find them. There used to be stickie posts for them...or a link, or something.

Sorry


www.shanerosseditor.com

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

Quote

Can you possibly offer a link to the white papers you mentioned on www.reduser.net?

Tom

The Final Cut Studio RED workflow whitepaper comes bundled with the FCS2 and FCS3 RED installers found on the RED website support downloads: www.red.com/support



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]