H E L P! HD to Digibeta/Beta SP/DVCAM for festival exhibition - Urgent Question..

R

RealDeal829

New member
For reasons beyond me, i cannot seem to find the answer to what seems to be a simple question .. We shot a short film in 720/24P (HVX200), which fortunately got into a few festivals, and I went to a post house to get transfers for the exhibition formats. To cover our bases (since we only just started submitting and all fests seem to vary), we opted for transfers to HDCAM, DigiBeta, Beta SP, and DVCAM. After outputting to HDCAM, we were set to make the downconverts to the SD formats, when the post house asked me a question about aspect ratio i couldn't answer. OK - so we shot in 16:9, and since HDCAM projects that way, we are fine there, but since some (or all) of the SD formats are 4:3, they asked do we go with "anamorphic," where the image is squeezed so that there is no additional rez loss, and the projector presumably widens the image back to its native 16:9 dimensions, OR do we make the image letterboxed by shrinking and adding black bars, so that it essentially can be projected to 4:3. My inclination is the former ("anamorphic 16:9"), but i'm scared to spend a ton of money and find out i made a mistake. Can someone please advise me ASAP? I need to give the post house an answer in two days ... Thanks in advance
 
You should really use the submission guidelines of the festivals rather than guessing. Do you have their exhibition format sheet?
 
Jason is correct.

You could probably just go with the HDCAM for now. Everything else can be created from that master. Next I would think an SD anamorphic copy, again, because all of your SD formats (letterbox and centercut) can be created from it. The SD copys are just extra though, in my opinion.

Curious, why do you need all the different tape formats? Three of the four are SD so one digiBeta master should do the trick. Heck, like I said, the HDCAM should do. Make all your dupes from it on an as needed basis.
 
Thanks very much for the feedback guys-
Well, the reason for all the formats is that the fests apparently vary a lot in terms of their exhibition requirements. For example, the first festival this film plays in (Temecula) requires Beta SP for their short films (and that's it; not DigiBeta, not HDCAM, etc), while the second (SoCal fest huntington beach) requires DVCAM (and nothing else, since they like to make a seamless master of all the shorts in programs on DVCAM). I asked the programming directors of both, and this was reiterated and confirmed. Now, of course I would prefer HDCAM for everything, and many of the fests (such as Sundance, etc) have graduated to HDCAM and have recently foregone SD exhibition formats, but unfortunately, it appears that it will take some time before this becomes the standard for the majority of the fests. And since the post house charges less if you make all your laybacks/dubs at once, it seems that it might be better to do it all at once up front, instead of going back later for additional dubs. As for the whole "anamorphic" thing - i think Andre is right - that the SD exhibition versions should probably be 16:9 anamorphic by default (and seems like others believe this too), and that I should avoid adding letterboxing to a 4:3 frame when making the transfers. THANKS again guys for your help - please chime in if you have any further thoughts or if i am mistaken in any of this
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top