Hi, we built a TV studio and have about 12k to buy a second camera. our
main camera to this point is a sony dxc-d50 BETA CAM. The director
wants a second beta cam. I am thinking digital would be better. we did
a comparison of the dxc-d50 and a sony PD 150 and trv900 and panasonic
dvx100a and they all got their respective clocks cleaned by the D50.
2/3" ccd and precision glass probably made the difference. at any rate,
what would be the advantage of going digital? or even hi def? we do
lots of green screen and compositing and currently capture with a
digisuite LE with premiere 6.0 and a dual processor G5 with a AJA iola
analog to digital converter. capturing uncompressed with the digisuite
is fine but the G5 is usually capturing in dv ntsc which is not too
good for compositing. it can capture uncompressed analog but the file
size is huge and after three layers in final cut frame drops occur. so
we'll usually use dv but that crimps the compositing stuff we do. any
suggestions?

Show quote Hide quote Consider DigiBeta gear. You can always just change out the DXCD50's VTR with
a DigiBeta VTR; this give you (theoretically) lossless tape dubs and such.

If you're serious about greenscreening, I wouldn't even use a VTR on the
D50, I'd get a studio back and just run uncompressed SDI to the computer. As
you've found out, DV kills the chroma signal so you really need 4:2:2 at the
LEAST (which, incidentally, is what DigiBeta will give you.

Not much point having one high def camera in a studio, you should ideally
have identical or near-identical cameras in a multicam situation. What you
could do is in future if you're looking to do field work convert the D50 to
an EFP rig (portable VTR, batteries, EFP lens etc) and get a HD studio
camera.

Hope that's some help.

resse wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteIf it were me I'd buy another betacam. Or a used DXC D30 because you can
put a beta or DVcam deck on the back.

The reason I'd try to get the same type of camera is so that they can
match them for two camera shoots.

I'd look at your AtoD conversion. I'm taking betacam into my G4 with
timecode and it works perfectly while digitizing and in FCP. I think you
may be set up incorrectly if you are getting frame drops. You might want
to look at Timeline, preferences and batch settings to be sure they all
agree on which type of timecode you want to use. I'm very serious when I
say I never have dropped frames. And I go up to 6 video layers sometimes
in FCP. Most serious layer stuff goes to after effects.

I'm also looking at a firewire AtoD solution that looks pretty good.
Under $800 it still has timecode and will work with my G4 laptop and
external hard drives.

That brings us to the last point. Huge file sizes are fine with me as
external hard drives (250gig) are well under $250 now.

I'm even archiving my shows and raw footage on external hard drives in
case they're needed later. One show I did has all raw footage (about 19
hours) all graphics, after effects files and the master FCP edit
project. There is still some room left over. I simply hate digitizing so
once it's there I'll archive it!

Bill

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