I shoot mostly educational in-studio productions and am shopping for a setup that will give me the highest quality I can get without going to HD.
Distribution is NTSC and PAL, both DVD and broadcast.
After working on high end DVCAMs (Sony DSR-500), I still can't get enough quality (especially with a lot of keying).
Possible causes:
a) recording in 4:1:1 when rendered to 4:2:0 on DVD (or in PAL) becomes 4:1:0, ie. 97% of the chroma information is removed
b) artifacts from the Discrete Cosine Transform compression used in DV formats
Betacam SP preserves more chroma, about equal to 4:2:2 sampling. But the analog tape format has a lower S/N than the best digital formats.
Betacam SX is MPEG, so probably trickier to edit in Vegas.
DigiBeta is really nice, but shockingly expensive and still compressed albeit very mildly.
My thinking is to get a Sony DXC-D35 family camera head with a CA-D50 adaptor that outputs pure SDI (259 Mb/s serial digital) with only one single A/D conversion (straight from the camera DSP).
Instead of using a $50K tape deck I would feed the SDI cable straight into a $295 BlackMagic hi-speed PCI card with live encoding to a fast harddrive (single SDI stream doesn't even need a RAID per BlackMagic). This can be done in 8-bit D-1 at about 1GB/minute, but who cares with today's harddisk prices? I come from a film background so I don't have high shooting ratios in my material anyway, everything is carefully planned.
As best as I can tell this will give a picture quality that should look better than any other SD tape format (short of D-5).
Of course I don't get the conveniences of tape (easier field recording, archival, etc.), but for my situation this seems a reasonable tradeoff. (The DXC camera heads can be docked with a Beta SX, Beta SP or DVCAM back for field use.)
Now the $10,000 question:
How does Vegas handle D-1?
Do I need to use a proxy to get good hands-on editing performance?
(Long renders are no problem, this is not 9:59pm editing for the 10 o'clock news.)
Will all effects etc. work with this 8-bit uncompressed video?
What if I capture as 10-bit uncompressed (also supported by the SDI standard)?
Experienced advice would be much appreciated, as well as pointers to any potential problems with this recording method.
Distribution is NTSC and PAL, both DVD and broadcast.
After working on high end DVCAMs (Sony DSR-500), I still can't get enough quality (especially with a lot of keying).
Possible causes:
a) recording in 4:1:1 when rendered to 4:2:0 on DVD (or in PAL) becomes 4:1:0, ie. 97% of the chroma information is removed
b) artifacts from the Discrete Cosine Transform compression used in DV formats
Betacam SP preserves more chroma, about equal to 4:2:2 sampling. But the analog tape format has a lower S/N than the best digital formats.
Betacam SX is MPEG, so probably trickier to edit in Vegas.
DigiBeta is really nice, but shockingly expensive and still compressed albeit very mildly.
My thinking is to get a Sony DXC-D35 family camera head with a CA-D50 adaptor that outputs pure SDI (259 Mb/s serial digital) with only one single A/D conversion (straight from the camera DSP).
Instead of using a $50K tape deck I would feed the SDI cable straight into a $295 BlackMagic hi-speed PCI card with live encoding to a fast harddrive (single SDI stream doesn't even need a RAID per BlackMagic). This can be done in 8-bit D-1 at about 1GB/minute, but who cares with today's harddisk prices? I come from a film background so I don't have high shooting ratios in my material anyway, everything is carefully planned.
As best as I can tell this will give a picture quality that should look better than any other SD tape format (short of D-5).
Of course I don't get the conveniences of tape (easier field recording, archival, etc.), but for my situation this seems a reasonable tradeoff. (The DXC camera heads can be docked with a Beta SX, Beta SP or DVCAM back for field use.)
Now the $10,000 question:
How does Vegas handle D-1?
Do I need to use a proxy to get good hands-on editing performance?
(Long renders are no problem, this is not 9:59pm editing for the 10 o'clock news.)
Will all effects etc. work with this 8-bit uncompressed video?
What if I capture as 10-bit uncompressed (also supported by the SDI standard)?
Experienced advice would be much appreciated, as well as pointers to any potential problems with this recording method.