U-Matic acquisition, discussion.

[SLavictoire]

Hi everyone!

In about 1 month, I will have to do some acquisition from U-Matic tapes.

I thought I would connect this U-Matic deck : To a DSR-25 mini-dv deck with the video input and make the acquisition with the DSR-25 with the firewire to my workstation.


Do you think it might work? I will use Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014 to do this.

[mainstreetprod]

No reason it wouldn't as long as the signal from the Umatic to the DV deck is clean. If both decks have S video, component or other superior to composite signal option, use it. Hopefully the Umatic tapes are not ancient. They should work fine for as long as 15-20 years.

Once you've transferrred the footage and it looks and sounds clean, digitizing it will go just like DV footage.

[ChristianMoriarty]

From the U-Matic - connect 1 video output to > the sync input of the DV deck

[SLavictoire]

Thanks for the precision ChristianMoriarty!

I shall give news as soon as possible.

[Greg Smith]

I have done exactly this to digitize my old work from the '80s, hundreds of hours, which was almost entirely on U-Matic tapes. I used a much cheaper Sony GV-D1000 mini-DV deck for the conversion. It worked just fine, the only problem being that the consumer-oriented mini-DV deck has only a non-switchable automatic audio level control, which got applied to all the footage I ran through it. I assume a pro-level machine wouldn't have that issue.

- Greg

[Andrius Simutis]

Ah, analog captured digitally...that takes me back!
If you have to do a lot of this and want to have deck control (assuming the Umatic has it) you should look for a used AJA IO box. It has component in and deck control so that you can set in and out points as well as capture TC if I recall. You can capture all your Umatic as ProRes and not suffer any DV interpretation in the middle. I would think that an AJA IO box would be pretty cheap these days.

edit: just looked on ebay and there are some for under $100

[SLavictoire]

Hey Mr Andrius Simutis,

Thanks for the advice about the AJA IO box, I don't think we would use this. Some of my bosses would found this overkill. But still, I think it would be a good idea, and we could develop something about capturing analog into digital. Yeah! that would be nice!