How to digitize betacam tapes at home?

[omarhazzaa]

I'm on the verge of starting an internet TV website, and I need to know if it's possible to digitize betacam tapes at home or not, as it's pretty expensive to only rely on post production houses to handle the digitizing and editing process. If it's possible then I need to know the devices which I need to buy. Also I need to know if it's applicable to use adobe premiere to handle the editing process as its much cheaper to buy windows rather than the expensive Mac machine.

[smok3]

there are office betacam players with dv output, some will support also digibeta & imx formats (the quality wont be great thought).

j30:
http://bssc.sel.sony.com/BroadcastandBusiness/DisplayModel?m=0&p=16&sp=20022&id=74220

[2Bdecided]

You can get used / second hand machines as studios dump them. You might even find one that works, with an S-video output.

Then just connect the S-video output into pretty much any capture card. The results are more than good enough for internet TV, and almost good enough for DVD (source material is often the limiting factor) - I know, I've done it.

Cheers,
David.

[Mug Funky]

some will support also digibeta & imx formats (the quality wont be great thought).

why would the quality be any worse for a digital format? or is it DV only output?

@ omarhazzaa:

you can require people to submit their content in DV or as files on DVDs... this will shift the burden to your content providers. i assume you're not shooting on betacam or you'd already have a deck...

also, usually if someone has a betacam/digi copy of something they'll also either have or be able to dub a DV copy. just don't be a smartarse and ask for DVCpro50 only (SBS, i'm looking in your direction!)

[smok3]

Mug Funky: i have only ever used DV with this tape (maybe there is SDI, but since my capture machine is DV only i didn't bother to look...)

[omarhazzaa]

Thanks guys for ur input, and I'll search for betacam players with an S-video output, and as well as a cutting edge capture card, but I have a question here: won't I face any problems technically when grabbing the video from a betacam player straight away to my windows? And will my end product in terms of quality and consistency come close to post production house’s end product?

[Blue_MiSfit]

won't I face any problems technically when grabbing the video from a betacam player straight away to my windows



Not really. If you get a deck with S-Video output, you can just capture it like any other analog video source. VirtualVCR, DScaler, VirtualDub, these should all be able to hook into any decent capture card and grab the uncompressed video stream - and probably encode on the fly to a decent lossless codec like HuffYUV in YUY2 for further processing (deinterlacing etc) before a final re-encode to your web format of choice.


And will my end product in terms of quality and consistency come close to post production house’s end product?


Will it come close? Sort of. A post house will have a beautifully maintained Beta SP deck with a really nice 10 bit analog component capture card. They will have TBCs, and will get the most out of your source. Does it really matter? Not really. If you're doing internet video, chances are you're going to loose a lot of resolution and overall quality due to aggressive compression. Let me guess, you're going to use Flash for your website? Let the quality of your typical youtube video explain things :) Even with a pristine lossless 1080p source, most typical web video formats will still look like crap :)

Unless you're going along the lines of Divx's Stage6, where you preserve a lot of image quality, and are flexible with regard to file sizes, resolutions, and encoding settings.

Tell us more!
~MiSfit

[2Bdecided]

Our Beta SP deck has a powerful TBC built in, so there are no problems feeding the output to even the pickiest of capture cards.

For higher quality, you'd need a way of capturing the component video output, since Beta SP records component signals on tape, which are higher quality than S-Video connectors can convey. "Standard" capture cards don't come with component inputs though.

In this case, S-video is fine for 320x240 web video. For real DVD quality, you need component.

Cheers,
David.

[omarhazzaa]

Now I nearly got that whole picture of how things shall work. Leaving the betacam issue aside.What if I can grab my material straight away from TV. I need to compare the end product -in terms of quality- of my video extracted from betacam(compressed to WMV 450 kbps & 850 kbps) VERSUS video extracted from a satellite receiver (compressed to WMV 450 kbps &850 kbps)?

Cheers
Omar

[Lyris]

Sorry to bump this thread, but the mention of Beta SP on the Sony J30 has got me thinking.

I usually use a Sony J30-SDI (that's the version with the SDI output, instead of the Component outputs) for capturing Betacam tapes - usually DigiBeta but occasionally Beta SP.

Since I'm capturing the SDI output of the machine, it's clearly doing its own Internal analog to digital conversion. Can anyone comment on the quality of this and how it would compare to a non-journalist deck's output when playing back Beta SP?

[lordsmurf]

Betacam analog out to capture card, capture and re-compressed to H.264 (MainConcept Reference or x264 only) for streaming.