So my first short film has just got into its first couple of festivals. Whew. I sent DVD screeners to the festival juries, but want to exhibit on DigiBeta. I'm thinking that rather than take a miniDV tape (digital cut) of the short film to a post-house to do the dub, I could rent a deck that records Digital Betacam tapes and plug straight into Avid and do a digital cut right to the Digital Betacam tape. My question is, will I actually get any better result this way? After all, it was shot on miniDV, so maybe taking a miniDV tape to the post-house is just as good as doing a dub straight from Avid Xpress onto a Digital Betacam. What do you think?
making my own DigiBeta from Avid
- Thread starter sean90291
- Start date
krestofre
Knight of the Holy Order
My two cents is to take it to a dub house. Cheaper and faster. You won't increase quality by going out of Avid to Digibeta.
Plus wrangling a digibeta deck is not as simple as doing a digital cut from Avid. In all cases that I know of you need at least SDI to go to digibeta.
If you're really concerned about quality contact a dub house and see if you can bring the master as a Quicktime File. Then you can render out a QT ref and turn that into an uncompressed file for the dub facility. Again, it's arguable that you'll see no decernable quality difference, but it's an option.
Plus wrangling a digibeta deck is not as simple as doing a digital cut from Avid. In all cases that I know of you need at least SDI to go to digibeta.
If you're really concerned about quality contact a dub house and see if you can bring the master as a Quicktime File. Then you can render out a QT ref and turn that into an uncompressed file for the dub facility. Again, it's arguable that you'll see no decernable quality difference, but it's an option.
Ramon Boutviseth
Well-known member
im glad i foud this thread, im actually doing something similar... this pretty much answers my question about the quality issues of going from dv to beta.. if its not noticeable.. then I wont bring in my uncompress with me to the dub house. I wonder if anyone has any experience with this and would like to say something..
just in case..
just in case..
Joe_Digital
Well-known member
I have a Digi Beta and it is the only thing I use for mastering in the SD world. SDI is obviously the choice, but Component is fine too.
You will have a better master by virtue of the compression applied when recording to the specific tape -i.e. I believe Digi Beta is 2:1 compression and DVCam is 5:1, so you would end up with less compression on the Digi Beta.
You will have a better master by virtue of the compression applied when recording to the specific tape -i.e. I believe Digi Beta is 2:1 compression and DVCam is 5:1, so you would end up with less compression on the Digi Beta.
Joe_Digital
Well-known member
If you're working in 1:1, then there should not be much compression if you're not rendering a lot of clips...The Mojo output via component should not compress the signal, maybe it is 5:1 via firewire -I don't know. However, we've done hundreds of broadcast hours with meridien SDI to digi beta and SDI uncompressed in and out is very very clean. We have not had a rejection once...and we generally do submasters from Digi Beta as either Beta SP or SX and they're still great quality. And, this includes closed captioning within the Avid.
daveroberts
Member
im sure i read somewhere once that because Avid, firewire and the DV camera all work in digits, there is no loss of quality between importing the raw footage from the tapes, editing and adding titles/effects, and exporting back to the same format of tape.
by using digibeta, you wouldnt be gaining any better quality from your video, however, more people might be happy to accept your video for use if it is on multiple formats.
from what i understand, you can make copies of a tape, using the latest copy as the master each time, and there should be no loss of quality, because the data is being transfered directly in 1's and 0's.
hope this helps
by using digibeta, you wouldnt be gaining any better quality from your video, however, more people might be happy to accept your video for use if it is on multiple formats.
from what i understand, you can make copies of a tape, using the latest copy as the master each time, and there should be no loss of quality, because the data is being transfered directly in 1's and 0's.
hope this helps
Another solution is to bring your media on a drive to a post house that has an Avid with SD-SDI output to make a digibeta master. Load the drive and project and hit play.
When working with DV25, the material gets decompressed while the pixels are manipulated (such as render) then recompressed back to DV25 - thus the definition of the word codec COmpression/DECompresion.
Coming into the AVID you have the choice of working in native DV25 captured over FireWire (gets decompressed as stated above for working) or you can choose to decompress on the capture (decompression creates an uncompressed video stream) and capture it as uncompressed or other form of compressed resolution such as 2:1, 3:1, etc.
I am producing a feature right now shot on DV25. I am doing the offline as 14:1 (giving me twice the storage) and then I will recapture as 1:1 in 4:2:2 color space for final mastering and prep for the uprez.
Michael
When working with DV25, the material gets decompressed while the pixels are manipulated (such as render) then recompressed back to DV25 - thus the definition of the word codec COmpression/DECompresion.
Coming into the AVID you have the choice of working in native DV25 captured over FireWire (gets decompressed as stated above for working) or you can choose to decompress on the capture (decompression creates an uncompressed video stream) and capture it as uncompressed or other form of compressed resolution such as 2:1, 3:1, etc.
I am producing a feature right now shot on DV25. I am doing the offline as 14:1 (giving me twice the storage) and then I will recapture as 1:1 in 4:2:2 color space for final mastering and prep for the uprez.
Michael
Hm...yeah, I will check to see if it's way more expensive bringing a drive in to the post house and opening it up on their Avid rather than just bringing in a miniDV tape. But I can see how that would give one a better result on digiBeta. I suspect I'd be paying the very pricey Avid suite rental on top of the dubbing cost.
RE: Making my own Digibeta from Avid
RE: Making my own Digibeta from Avid
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RE: Making my own Digibeta from Avid
sean90291 said:
Sorry to post an advert type thing as I just joined, but we have created a service to address this exact need, for capturing and outputting your projects.
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