U-Matic acquisition, discussion.

SLavictoire

SLavictoire

Well-known member
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.
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Do you think it might work? I will use Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014 to do this.
 
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.
 
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
 
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
 
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!
 
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