John -
am very interested in your 1" service.
Would you post email address or email me directly at vicmilt@interpubco.com please?

John, Thanks very much for your response and your offer. The films are short animations, (5-10 minutes each). I will make some calls Monday to set up a transfer as per these specs. Since the 1" tapes are fragile and hard to replace (original films have faded), I wouldn't want to risk shipping them, but I certainly appreciate your extreme generosity. Sally

John Cline:

Do you get many takers for your '1" service'?

*grin*

Andy

Andy,

I don't actively market the 1", but you might be surprised how much stuff is still out there on 1" tape...

John

John:

I'm not disputing the amount of one inch tape out there, it was the syntax of the 'One inch service' that tickled me (So to speak).

Hence the *grin*.

Well, it was a quiet day at work!

Cheers,

Andy

I cannot recommend anywhere for you but probably getting it dubbed to DigiBetacam would be a good start and have it done by someone who takes care to keep their 1" machines properly aligned.
I'd never treat anything on DVD as archival grade, the very best media may last 20 years if we're lucky. If it's been compressed to mpeg-2 then there's significant losses involved there as well.
Once you've got a good master, given that it's animation it should tolerate some moderate noise reduction, that'll free up some bandwidth for the encoder. You could also get it encoder by someone with a high end hardware encoder that'll go SDI to mpeg-2

Do you think there'd be signifigant quality difference in transferring from 1", as compared to 3/4," to digibeta? Sally

Sally, if you're asking if there would be a significant difference in the quality of a dub from 1" to 3/4" as opposed to DigiBeta, the answer is yes. 3/4" simply doesn't have the bandwidth capabilities that 1" is capable of supplying. A friend at a local post house would go down 5 generations on a 1" tape before he'd say "that's it". On 3/4" SP, I never went more than 2 generations unless I had no choice.

Mike

DigiBetacam can be copied with little generational loss, believe it or not DV25 is better in this respect as the SDI signal coping out of the deck is not an exact digital copy of what's on the tape. If the machine(s) use SDTI that doesn't apply.
The big advantage though of DigiBetacam is the huge amount of redundancy of the data, it was designed to withstand the abuse of TV stations!

Wow, fast replies. Thanks. I guess what I'm debating is whether my local transfer station shop, that does have 1 " machines (which did a crap job on my transfer to dvd) would be likely to better handle the 1 " to DigiBeta. In the past they've urged me to make a DigiBeta master, rather than continue to use my 3/4" masters, to duplicate the films. I think I'll give it a chance. I seem to have a treasure trove of obsolete formats.

Subtle. Very subtle.

I think I can safely say DigiBeta has got a few good years left in it.

I'm debating is whether my local transfer station shop (which did a crap job on my transfer to dvd) would be likely to better handle the 1" to DigiBeta.

If they did a poor job the first time waround, what makes you think they'll do any better this time? I'd insist on being there for the transfer to ensure that they do, according to your eyes, the best quality job possible. If they come up with any excuses as to why you can't be there, I'd look elsewhere. A good shop prides itself on it's reputation and shouldn't have any objections to a paying client sitting in on a session.

Mike

Several weeks later- I got the Digibeta made as a favor at a fancy post production house. Then I call up Fotokem to ask them to make the DVD master that I can use to put together the compilation of my films using Vegas.
The sales person tells me I can't possibly do this at home, that I need general media discs with special code that only a resource with $75,000 equipment can do, and the price quote, for 100 discs, was close to $15 per disc. She said if they did it, the discs would still be burned, but compatible on all different decks. She said I could save money by making my own labels!

If this is true, why is all this software available for home creation? I'm bewildered. Sally

I think you've been fed a load of BS there!
If you don't mind shipping your DB copies down here I'll do it for you, we have J30 decks that'll play out NTSC as well as PAL via 1394.
The only issue there is that you'll get a slight qulaity loss as I'd have to ingest as 4:1:1 whereas your DB material is now 4:2:2. However as the material originated on 1" I seriously doubt you'll see the difference.
Bob.

Thanks very much, Bob. My email address is funonmars@earthlink.net. Please contact me at your convenience so we can proceed with this.
Best Wishes, Sally

Sent,
Bob.

yikes, I'm still struggling with this thing, and need help fast.

An art museum in the US offered to make the transfer to AVI for me at no charge in exchange for rights to digitize some of my films which they owned in 16mm, for archival purposes. Great, I thought. Then I had to provide a firewire. okay, I can use that later. Just now I received a frantic email saying this:

"I asked them (the post production company) to digitize the digibeta material as raw .avi files. My understanding is that you want one uncompressed file. The .avi format has a 2 gigabit file size limit.

Can you tell me a little more about what you want to do with this material.
We can send it to you as an uncompressed quicktime file which is the highest quality and importable into most edit systems. If you are okay with having multiple files under 2 gigabits that you then reassemble, then they can do it in .avi format."

The films run approx. 30 minutes.

I thought I could get it all as one avi file. Should I request the quicktime uncompressed, for best quality? I need to tell them tomorrow. I have no idea about this. Thanks for any advice. Sally

That doesn't sound right to me. 30 minutes of my Sony Digital 8 camera is 6 and 1/2 Gigabytes. That Sony .avi is very similar to Windows .avi in size. Uncompressed qucktime is only 2 Gigs? If they could make a "Data" file of the .avi, your computer could reassemble it. That would really be uncompressed compared to quicktime. They can only get about 18 minutes on a DVD R, so it would take two discs. (big deal). Actually, Bob (farss) is usually the person who talks about this format the most. I've never made one. But he sounds like he knows the process well. It may be as simple as making a 'data-only' back up DVD. But wait for him (Bob) to see this and, hopefully, chime in.

Ask them if they can make AVI 2.0 files, these have no size limit (with FAT32 or NTFS). Vegas can handle this format, as can many other applications.

Vegas can also work with Quicktime files as long as it has the codec, uncompressed 4:2:2 should be fine.

Thanks for both replies. I've passed the info on, and will see what develops. Meantime it's raining in this computer room so I'm going to shut it down fast! Sally