Betacam Capture

My company is finally making the switch from PC to mac for vdeoediting. I was wondering if anyone could tell me the cheapest, but still reliable option to import betacam. I've looked at the decklink option and was wondering if anyone had experience with it.

Thnx

Well, from my experience with the Decklink family, a Decklink SP or Extreme should keep you happy for reasonable price. We went for the Extreme card (as we needed the SDI input) after trying out the AJA Io box, and we've had a good run with our five systems. We are still running with FCP 4.5 and decklink drivers 4.8, but I expect the BMD developers have made a solid driver for FCP 5.0 as well.

The only major problem we had was that our local reseller delivered the cards with G5 1.8 GHz models, whose PCI architecture was incompatible with the Extreme cards. But once we got properly spec'ed computers everything ran fine.

The card has its limitations in that the videooutputs are few. This is easily solved by adding a patch of some sort that allows you to change between deck and monitor on the outputs for example.

I know that some people have had problems with video sync, especially with the UVW-1400 machine (there is a workaround on the BMD support pages). As far as I know all these problems are solvable if you just get everything hooked up right. We have a house sync generator here, and I recommend getting one. Hook it up to everything, and you never worry about sync again.

Another minor quirk, at least on the Extreme card, is that the audio inputs doesn't work unless you have a video input as well. Again no biggie, just hook up your deck or black burst to the videoinputs when you want to do voice-overs and such.

Support has been good so far, but I really haven't needed much. The blackmagic forum on creativecow.net is good, with developers and support guys from BMD being active participants. Except for the problem we had with the underspec'ed machines (that needed a quick e-mail to support to sort out), I've had all my questions answered by that forum.

Videoquality is excellent, the drivers seem rock solid and the software is useful and intuitive. I'd recommend going for BMD. If you get the Extreme card you will be ready to accept digibeta or DVCPro material over SDI as well. That has come in handy for us on several occasions.

Geir.

I just stumbled across a support document update that states that the April 2005 model G5 2 GHz has the same problems as the G5 1.8 GHz i mentioned. Neither has the PCI-X slots required to support the Decklink cards.

Geir.