I don't think upscaling it to HD is really a good idea. Whenever you rescale an image (properly), it will suffer generation loss.

e.g. if you take a picture and repeatedly scale it bigger/smaller, the picture will get slightly worse and worse.

But regardless, if you really wanted "HD", you could make a SD master and then upconvert that.

To add on:

BetaSP is an analog format. You can capture it as either analog component or SDI (with a betaSP deck that outputs SDI).

One way to do it would be to get a betaSP deck... that will be *at least* a few thousand dollars. The cheapest would be to get a used betaSP deck (or rent one)... otherwise I believe you'd have to buy a new digital betacam VTR that also reads betaSP (not all do), and that runs into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Get a capture card that can handle analog component, and make sure it works on your system because there may be driver and hardware conflicts. I have no experience here.

You'll also need fast enough hard drives (e.g. RAID them together) and a lot of hard drive space. You'd be capturing 10-bit uncompressed 4:2:2 (10-bit sonyYUV in Vegas terminology)... that takes up a lot of space. (Uncompressed 4:2:2 codecs take up less space than uncompressed 4:4:4 codecs, so uncompressed may be a bit of a misnomer. And done correctly, it suffers generation loss. But uncompressed is the term other people use.)

For outputting, your highest quality would be a data file. In professional workflows, they may master onto digital betacam (which is a lossy format) for workflow reasons... which actually introduces a small (almost always unnoticeable) amount of compression.

*- You could probably get away with ingesting it as DV, as long as you make sure the chroma doesn't look screwed up.

First thing I would want to know is ,,what is the delivery format. If its back to beta , then you got a lot of costs involved decks ,cards etc. If its dvd then its easy. As Glenn said you can convet it to dv, or have someone with an old beta deck and avid or fcp system digitized it and put it on an external drive, making sure you have the codec to read it.

So more random thoughts:

BetaSP decks are not that expensive, heck down here a HDV deck costs more. SD 10bit YUV only needs a Decklink card, a modern PC and two SATA drives in RAID 0, hardly a kings ransom these days. 10bit YUV plays out probably better than HDV on my lowly quad core. As said above you could also get a post house to capture to HDD for you, do watch out for codec issues. The BMD QT codec I think will open OK in Vegas but you'd really want to check this.

If you do heavy color correction then V9's new 32bit mode would be good I think, edit in 8 bit and switch to 32bit for CC and final render. A good calibrated broadcast monitor would be good to rent or you can leave it as is, render to 10bit YUV using 32bit (video) and send the file off to a post house for grading. Just about anything seems able to read the Sony YUV codec.

Poor mans way to do the job. Hire a J30 VCR. They have a firewire port so it looks just like a DV deck to Vegas. You just capture it as DV and edit away. I know people do this and then send the DV tape to a post house to dub to Digital Betacam. Shocking but true.
If delivery is simply DVD then encode to mpeg-2 etc as per usual. My only concern is this works better for us in PAL land than NTSC. Other concern in the J30 is not stellar with SP. There's no dropout compensation, not an issue if the tapes are pristine. Might be a few other analogue tweaks missing in the J30 as well. I think timecode comes over OK.

The ONE workflow that could really mess with your head using Vegas that is pretty popular is to rent J30, capture DV, edit DV, get client approval and then send tapes and EDL to post house.I guess you could send the tapes and Vegas project file to a post house that has Vegas but they're pretty rare although we've got one down here.

I'd really forget about upscaling it to deliver it on BD. It's pretty unlikely the source footage is 16:9 so that means throwing pixels away even before upscaling.

Bob.

Guys:

Thanks for the cogent help.

Beta decks are not that costly around here, either:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120423882065&ssPageName=MERCOSI_VI_ROSI_PR4_PCN_BIX&refitem=230346479705&itemcount=4&refwidgetloc=closed_view_item&refwidgettype=osi_widget&_trksid=p284.m263&_trkparms=algo%3DSIC%26its%3DI%252BC%252BP%252BS%252BIA%26itu%3DFICS%252BUFI%252BUA%252BIA%252BUCI%26otn%3D4%26ps%3D10#ebayphotohosting

I’ll start shopping the capture cards Bob mentioned right away.

I probably started thinking HD incorrectly. Client wanted to finalize on DVD—no broadcast involved—with as good an image quality as possible, which got me wondering if BluRay was a better way to go.

Since the Beta footage is really good-looking, I could probably not need to upscale it to HD.

But you wrote about busting it down to DV. Wouldn’t that push the image down to DV, 4:2:2 with all the attendant weaknesses?


Thanx again.

BetaCamSP is 4:2:2.
Converting it to DV drops it down to 4:1:1.
See this page on Adam Wilt's site for some tech info on this.

Mike

BetaCamSP is analog SD and I think I've read that the signal that's recorded actually puts it somewhere between 4:2:2 and 4:1:1.

We still have a BetaCam SP deck here for use with clients bringing us older footage. We use it less and less, and maybe won't use it again. The ideal routine is to have a deck with an SDI card installed. The card digitizes the analog signal and feeds it to whatever system is controlling the deck with a capture card.

If this were Vegas I'd want an AJA card in the system over a BMD card just because I hear less complaining. I'm assuming that the AJA card won't give you problems but I'd confirm it with someone who knows.

When you injest through SDI you can actually write the media in any codec that the card supports. This works out to be a great equalizer when you've got a bunch of sources with SDI outputs because you can convert them all to one type of codec as you digitize.

Our Media100 systems captured everything as Motion JPEG, even DV sources became mjpeg (and, in fact, our DV deck only has SDI output, no firewire). Now on our Mac this same stuff might be captured in a ProRes codec or maybe DVCPro50. On our Axio/PPro2 systems the same stuff might be captured in a Matrox 10-bit codec. The point here is that SDI gives you a lot of choices.

A BMD or AJA card should also give you deck control with time code. You'd want that because you need to get the time code.

If you didn't want to buy or rent equipment then I'd look into getting the material transferred to disk at some other facility. You could start by getting VHS window dubs so that you could select the clips you want by time code and then only digitize what you need.

There's also the possibility of just getting an AJA card that accepts both SDI and analog input and then feeding an analog signal from a rented deck to the card. But really, the simplest thing would probably be to get digitized footage delivered to you on disk and never having to deal with the tapes directly. BetaSP is a legacy recording format and I don't think it's worth investing a lot of money into it. Even the AJA card is mostly useful for monitoring these days.

Clients: You gotta love 'em.

After grilling my client a little and eventually getting him to let me talk to his tech guy, I found out that all the footage was actually shot on SD DV and DVCPro HD. the only reason he was talking to me about Beta SP is that my guy just always got his footage on Beta, and didn't know about the digital stuff.

Thank goodness I dug around.

So I can get it in DVcam and HDV.

I got the DVCAM deck. Just have to figure out if the DVCPro HD will be problematic.

A couple of years ago, I got basic DVCPro tape from a TV Station, and had a hell of a time finding a dupe house with a DVCPro 25 deck.

Sorry for the confusion. The information I got here was worth it, though.

Thanks to all.