Lossless Print to Tape in 4:2:2?

1charmedlife wrote on 11/21/2003, 3:11 PM

Hi all,

I'm a Final Cut Pro expatriate who has a film that has been color corrected and film grained in After Effects - and I have an entire sequence of PNG's that I'd like to import to Vegas (100,000 frames +), sync up the PAL audio, and then output to Digital Betacam via Firewire for final delivery.

Is it possible to do this completely lossless? Our AE PNG files all look REALLY good and it seems to be the best output we can get from After Effects. DBC decks do have some firewire input options don't they? Can Vegas print to tape from the PAL project but output NTSC to the deck?

Any hints or tips and tricks would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Comments

john-beale wrote on 11/21/2003, 4:39 PM

PNG frames use lossless compression. D-5 is lossless (20 MB/sec for SD). DigiBeta is very good but not lossless, I believe it is about 3:1 compression. Anyway I thought the DigiBeta decks always used SDI interfaces. Panasonic's DVCPRO50 format is also 4:2:2 at 3:1 compression (7 MB/sec), and there are decks (eg. AJ-SD930) with an optional firewire interface card. As far as I know only FCP can import/export DVCPRO50 via firewire, though it would be great if Vegas could too.

SonyEPM wrote on 11/22/2003, 6:57 AM

Check out the Blackmagic Decklink. As of right now it doesn't completely interface with Vegas, but Vegas can read and write files using the BMD codec, so you can import your sequence into Vegas, edit as needed, add titles, do the soundtrack etc, then render to the BMD codec, open that file in the BMD print utility, and lay back the master to Digibeta over sdi (or whatever you want).

Make sure your machine is up to the task- you need a well tweaked monster to pull this off.