Best quality without overkill from BetaSP

My friend has asked me to help him with some minor changes to his finished feature film. The master is on BetaSP (it was shot on film) and we'll be working at a post house with all the bells and whistles; we want to record back out to Digibeta and possibly HDCam too. I don't think storage will be a problem although these guys have never done 8- or 10-bit on their SAN...

The question is: what codec to digitize at? Will we see a big quality bump using DVCPro over DV, and would uncompressed be overkill with this source footage? And assuming we use a Kona 2 (or other hardware) to upconvert to HDCam, how might that affect our capture process?

TIA, JK

BetaSP is a heavily compressed analogue tape format, and adding any digital compression to that is not going to be nice. I think 8bit uncompressed is your best bet to preserve what little quality you have left by using BetaSP as a master.

BTW, there is no quality difference from DVCpro over DV - they're identical.

I doubt BetaSP will look very good at all on upconvert to HD, no matter what hardware it's done with - remember that betaSP has 3/4 of the luma resolution of DV and DigiBeta!

Graeme



[www.nattress.com] - Plugins for FCP-X

That's interesting, Graeme -- so in terms of luminance Beta is a weaker format than DV? But Betacam SP is a far better format overall, isn't it?

No, I'd say it's weaker than DV overall.

Graeme



[www.nattress.com] - Plugins for FCP-X

<<<No, I'd say it's weaker than DV overall.>>>

Except time and editing, of course. All the grownup decks on 422 control will do accurate, one-frame edits all day long. That's still a problem on DV. I have done one-frame animations in an SP suite.

On original material, the two format's quality would be a close race. I would say you couldn't tell the difference. BetaSP degenerates in copies much more rapidly than DV, of course, and if you knew where to look, the SP signal is very slightly noisier, but it's not obvious. SP was the first time we had a format where further increases in quality were not shocking.

Nowhere did you ever hear the magic words, "My SP tape is out of sound sync," or "Which audio level does this SP tape use."

Sometimes, it's the little things.....

Koz

John,

I'd take Graeme's advcie and go with 8Bit (component out from the SP deck, capture thru an AJA or similar to 8Bit). It's about triple the file size of DVCPro50 (is that what you mean when you say DVCPro?), but is as close as you'll get to preserving whatever quality you have coming off BetaSP. From 8Bit you can then try the bump up to HDCam, but do a test of a few minutes of the material first to get an idea of what the final result will be.

I'd have a post house do that final step, playing out from an 8Bit file to HDCam, although don't expect miracles. It will never stand up to an HD telecine, which would have been wisest from the outset given final output to HDCam, and may well need some adjustment in chroma and luma.

Best,
Clay

Thanks for the advice all. I'm going in there today so we'll see how it shakes out; I can't say enough about LAFCPUG -- you guys make this such a great resource!

JK