HDV to Beta SP questions

Yoyodyne wrote on 6/21/2005, 1:49 PM
I have tried dubbing from the Sony HDV deck directly to Beta and I have 2 questions.

oh - we are connecting directly form the HDV component outs to the component ins on the beta deck - same with the audio, rca outs to xlr ins. The downconversion is set to letterbox.

The video looked rather washed out and soft - we compared it with another Beta tape and that one looked better chroma wise. Is this just the best that HDV deck can do - when monitoring the HDV as HDV on my Dell 2405 the chroma looks great. (actually everything looks incredible)

The audio out from the HDV deck to the Beta deck sounds slightly crunchy to me - it is peaking at about -2 on the HDV meters. Is this to hot a signal for the beta deck? In Vegas at what level should I set my tone at? For that matter what level should I set the audio peaking at?

Thanks a ton for any info,
Yoyodyne

Comments

farss wrote on 6/21/2005, 3:44 PM
I've never tried going down the component connection path, done quite a few dubs using 1394 to DVCAM which looks pretty impressive. I'm assuming that the decks do all the correct conversions on the component outputs as well but you never know. Letterboxing wouldn't help the image any but that shouldn't affect the chroma. Of course all the dubs I've done have been in PAL, maybe there's a setup issue involved?
As to the audio, I'd have thought you'd have the opposite problem, I think the HDV decks have consummer line level outputs whereas the SP decks are pro level (-10dB V +4dB) so if anything you audio will be down in level. Remember though HDV audio is mpeg1 layer2, it's good enough maybe for speech but music sounds pretty bad.
Bob.
Yoyodyne wrote on 6/21/2005, 6:32 PM
Thanks for the info fars,

I think it might be a monitoring problem - the Ikegami Production monitor is a bit of a war horse so everything looks a little washed out on it. I'm gonna grab another monitor and stab it into the beta deck just to make sure.

The audio thing is a bit of a puzzle - I'm having to crank the inputs all the way open to get a signal that peaks around the zero vu line (just getting into the red - this of course makes sense because of the -10/+4 deal). But it sounds to me just a bit "fuzzy". I'm bringing my good sony headphones over and give it a better listen tommorrow.

The torture of all this is that we have to deliver on Beta because that's what the stations have asked for and it's what our client has delivered on in the past. The stations will then re-digitize it into there media server playback systems for broadcast. I talked to a few of them about delivering a digital file but they did not seem too interested. When I asked them about HD they said it was a few years away...