You're doing it for free (true?) and you're doing it in a DV nle. Have them send the DV tapes.

If they have any opinions you can tell them your end product will be on DV. The only reason to get the Beta SP tapes is if their dubs to DV were somehow really bad. To put it another way, you're converting the BetaSP to DV25 anyway so unless they know there will be a huge improvement in doing the dub again...

If The DV was BetaSP->VHS->DV25 then you might think harder about it.

Rob Mack

Rob, the masters are Beta SP. It definately will go BetaSP ->DV25

OK, cool news.

I asked them how exactly this transfer works. They said they take the original masters, and will transfer it right to MiniDV for me. There is nothing going inbetween the two. She said the masters are whatever format was popular at the time (she said Onyx's earlier stuff was probably on some sort of reel, whatever that means).

By the sound of it the earlier stuff was on 1" tape.
Probably that has been transferred to SP and the later stuff was mastered on SP. I'd just stick with the MiniDV.
I'd be interested to hear how the MiniDV material compares to what you've already done off SVHS. Using the VX2000 to ingest the SVHS material might not have given the best possible results though.

Yeah, she said 1" tape. What is that, anyway? Is that good?

She said if it was on 1" tape, that's the source I am getting it from before going to MiniDV.

Hi,

1" tape is called 1" because it is 1" wide. This format used to be the reference (best) in linear editing suite before BETA and BETA SP arrived.

If they produce their DV generation directly from the 1" masters, I would take the DV tapes, then produce cd's ASAP in case of tape defects in time.

1" to DV is much better than 1" to BETA SP to DV.

Gilles

I think you got some good advice in that dv25 directly from the original is probably best for you. To explain the CODEC thing a bit more dv25 does not do interframe compression using commonality between frames. It compresses only I frames [similar to the JPEG still images]. It uses a 4:1:1 color reduction. MPEG2 uses a similar I frame so going from one I frame to the other shouldn't add much additional loss. However, MPEG2 is a 4:2:2 CODEC so you are feeding it only half the color that it uses, big color hit on front end. MPEG2 adds P and B frames between the I frames that basically only contain difference and vector information. These are much smaller than I frames but contain enough information to recreate the I frames that they represent. If you do any more of this you might want to look at dv50; it is much better than the consumer dv25 in that it gives about 800 lines at 4:2:2 rather than 500 lines at 4:1:1; in other words, it marries much better with MPEG2 in that it provides basically all the quality MPEG2 can handle and should give similar results to starting with uncompressed video. Once again for your current situation the other posts are correct; go for the minidv rather than SVHS [which by the way has 400 lines and poor color--but is much better than standard VHS which has only about 225 lines].

What is DV50? Is that like DVCAM?

A higher bit rate 50 Mbps rather than 25 Mbps with at least twice the quality of the consumer CODEC. DV50 and DV100 are generally used by professionals, whereas DV25 is considered a consumer or prosumer (not sure exactly what that means--I think Sony adopted the word--maybe a sophistocated user with a consumer budget for equipment purchase). DV100 is a 4:4:4 format and captures color info ever frame, DV50 [4:2:2] every other frame, and DV25 [4:1:1] every 4'th frame [note: slightly simplified do a web search for a more accurate discussion including 4:2:0].
DVCAM is similar to DV25 in that is 25 Mbps but is a different CODEC; it would fall in the consumer grade [in my opinion] although it is advertised as Pro [for some reason, I don't see it myself].
By the way DV50 is considered to be almost as good as Beta SP. DV25 is more in the Hi8 quality range.

I would have to go by what Adam Wilt says in his extensive website:

http://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-tech.html#DVformats

DV25 (in the NTSC world) is a 4:1:1 sampling format, which means that, on any video line, color information is recorded for only one out of every four pixels. This means that color is slightly "blurred" in the horizontal direction when compared to a 4:2:2 or a 4:4:4 sampling, but for most purposes it's good enough. The pros use the higher color sampling formats when they need to get exceptionally-clean blue-screen effects (though Vegas does a surprisingly good job at this).

DV is ranked by Adam Wilt as being just as high a quality (in fact, slightly better) than either 1" tape or BetaSP.

The only real difference between DV25 and DVcam is that the latter runs the tape 50% faster, which means the tapes are more easily interchangeable. That's all.

Gold: DV50 is, as far as I know, still based on an imagespace of 480x720 (in NTSC countries). As such, it has the same luminance resolution as regular old DV25, or about 500 lines/picture-height horizontally. What IS improved, of course, is the horizontal color resolution, which doubles from 180 samples per scan line (DV25) to 360 (DV50).

ok, now I am even more confused on this whole DV25 DV50 and DV100.

First off, bitrate does not matter to me. A DVD is 8MBPS so a 25MBPS source or a 100MBPS source makes no difference.

As for this color thing, is this a big difference? Keep in mind Def Jam charged us $120 for this DV tape, so it would be kinda annoying to have to order ANOTHER tape.

Also, how do I know Def Jam isn't sending this on a DV50 or DV100? Are they different types of tapes? Does all that stuff matter based on the camera? I have access to a Sony DSR 250 camcorder, which as far as I know, is a high quality camera. Will it accept DV50 or DV100 tapes?

Thanks guys!

Minidv is only dv25.
Adam Wilt is a strong DV advocate. Note that Beta SX goes directly to mpeg2 which is a vastly superior format for the same bit rate. Also note the difference in price between Beta SP/SX and dv25 systems; there is actually a lot more under the hood than just the CODEC, the quality of the CCD's, analog amplifiers, etc. also goes along with the the higher cost recording media. So even if a Beta SX and a dv25 prosumer camera both recorded to dv25, I ass/u/me that the quality of the digitized video would be noticibly better from the Beta SX camera. For a low cost prosumer solution, you might want to consider buying the best video camera you can afford and sending the NTSC signal directly into an MPEG2 capture card (note: low cost ones like the Hauppauge 250 are probably higher quality than those in prosumer cameras--but this is a supposition for which I have no proof).
As far as tv lines, I've never truly understood the limits. If you have a 720x480 image and dv storage media typically tops out at 550 lines but theoretically can be up to 800 lines in dv format with no storage media loss loses me as it would seem that 541 would be the max if TV lines is defined as horizontal resolution divided by aspect ration 720/(4/3)--I would appreciate an explanation of this phenomena. Are they using sdtv format to get the 800 lines?

ok well that Sony DSR 250 camcorder I have, would that accept DV50 and/or DV100 tapes?

No one knows if that Sony DSR 250 camcorder I have, would that accept DV50 and/or DV100 tapes?