Thanks Bob,

I am working in PAL and the camera tapes are original.

In the past I have played out of a Digi camera as composite video via a DV camera Firewired into Vegas. Would using a J3 produce better pictures?

As for the Decklink, which would be the obvious route, it looks to be a tricky option considering the system spec require to run the card. Anyone suggestions gratefully received.

Cheers

Phil

Capturing via SDI will give you the best quality by far. If you capture to the Decklink 10-bit codec, you lose none of the original Digibeta goodness.

Composite to DV is quite lossy, you'll see a substantial improvement dropping that.

The cheapest Decklink card with SDI is about $300. Note that the system specs are for modern machines mostly about the disks.

You could also capture to the DVCPRO50 codec (see previous posts here), this has similar quality to DB at a bit rate that is only twice that of basic DV (DV25), and it is still 4:2:2 so you don't lose PQ when compositing, etc.

Thanks for that,

One thing you said

'Note that the system specs are for modern machines mostly about the disks.'

I not sure what you mean by 'mostly about the disks.' Have you missed a 'not' out ?

Cheers

Phil

I meant that disk performance tends to be the limiting factor.

Do make sure to follow the required system specs on the BMD site. I learned from experience that they are absolutely necessary.

With your P4 CPU, don't expect to be able to do anything else while capturing. 10-bit DB capture takes up about 99.99% of that CPU.

It was good relief to move to a quad core and and 8-core, but my 3.2GHz P4 did the job when it had to.

So you reckon my system would just about work with the basic BMD sdi card?

P

It should work fine, as long as you're running Windows XP, not Vista (which would need more RAM).

See also the following from BMD's web site:

Note

Note however that if the Vegas support should fail, you can capture using the Decklink capture utility that comes with their cards.

That's great, thanks for your time.

Cheers

Phil

Phil,
where are you?

We certainly offer a service where we capture the full 10bit 4:2:2 from the tapes to a HDD for clients. Most post houses would likely offer this same service as well.
You only really need the to meet the BMD specs for capture.
For what it's worth getting a J30 deck with a firewire interface would probably be slightly better than going component or composite of S-Video into an outboard A/D converter.

I'm in Sydney Australia. If I can help you with this, email is in my profile

Bob.

FYI, I've captured Digibeta (PAL) using a Blackmagic Decklink Card, via SDI, into Sony Vegas. I did not need a RAID array for standard-def content; my standard 7500RPM hard disk worked fine. We've released several DVDs using this setup.

Did you capture as 8 or 10 bit?

I suspect with a clean disk there'll be no problems. The reason BMD's specs are so high is to handle sustained write speeds with a fullish fragmented disk.

Bob.

If you really want to see what the exact difference is between the different ways to capture DigiBeta, this article will give you that and more.

A truly comprehensive comparison of the different capture methods.

For a good insight into the implications of digital interfaces this article by Adam Wilt is also interesting. So many people keep calling things "uncompressed" and yet a capture over SDI is neither uncompressed or lossless compared to what's on the DB tape.There's only 1 or 2 systems that'll capture from DB without loss and I think only 1 VCR from Sony with the SDTI option.

I regularly poll clients renting our J30s, very few capture over SDI. I've authored commercial DVDs by capturing both ways. The core question really is how much better is the outcome doing the conversion in software compared to the hardware in the J series VCRs. From what I can see very, very little. In NTSC land all that changes for sure.

One thing to be wary of with the "J" series is that "J" seems to stand for Journalist i.e. these are not VCRs built for production. They seem as good as any for digital tape capture. For SP we have reservations. There's certainly no dropout compensation. They seem to be OK with pristine SP tapes but any tapes that are a bit long in the tooth fare better in likes of the BVW 75.

Still the J series are a godsend, one of the best units Sony ever built.

Bob.

Farss: full 10 bit, and it wasn't even on a new or especially clean disk. I've captured 2-hour feature films from DigiBeta without issues, but I suppose it depends on the drive.

I agree totally about the J-Series units, they're a real lifesaver: PAL and NTSC playback in one unit. Wonder when we'll see an HDCAM SR equivalent :)

Thanks for the articles, will read!

Hi Bob,

I'm based in Birmingham, England, which I think is a No 10 bus via Singapore to get to you. I'll see you in 4 months! Thanks for the offer though, there are a couple of post houses here, but with the cost of transfer I might as well hire the deck, buy the card and give my P4 a hard time.

The card I'm getting is the Blackmagic Design DeckLink 2 Part Number: BMD-BDLK, is this the one you would recommend?

Phil

I've had mine for a few years so I think it's the original Decklink.
Cost me around AUD 500, that should be around 250 British Pounds I guess.
You'll also need a BNC to BNC lead and a 9 pin to 9 pin cable for RS 422 deck control.
You may have issues getting Vegas to capture with the BMD drivers.
BMD do supply a utility for capturing. I have had issues going down that path that freaked me right out. For some reason in the middle of a clip Vegas managed to reverse field order several times in the encoded file for the DVD. This was a straight capture, trim, encode project.
I later captured the same tape using Ppro and opened the file in Vegas 8 and encoded it and it was perfect.
On the other hand the older BMD drivers worked flawlessly with V7.0.

Can't understand post houses charging a kings ransom for doing this kind of work. It's monkey see, monkey do stuff that they give to the new recruit surely. We offer that kind of service very cheaply at standby rates, just so long as clients accept that could mean several days turn around.

Bob.