HDV to BetaSP
by maheelrp
on
Sep 28, 2007 at 6:50:54 am
I use Avid Express HD and Premier/Cineform systems to edit HDV materials from Zony Z1. I need to get the edited material from the time line to BetaSp deck.
Could you please advise me the most suitable Convergent design box for the task? And the availabilty (I hear some models are out of stock).
Re: HDV to BetaSP by John Schell on Oct 2, 2007 at 12:28:48 pm
The best unit for you would be the HD-Connect LE, which has analog component output. The LE does HDV to HD/SD-SDI, component, and composite. The only issue would be with audio, the LE outputs AES audio or unbalanced audio. You would need a converter like the flying cow to convert from AES to balanced analog. The LE is not setup to control the deck from the NLE.
Re: HDV to BetaSP by Tim Kolb on Oct 9, 2007 at 3:35:42 pm
[maheelrp]"I use Avid Express HD and Premier/Cineform systems to edit HDV materials from Zony Z1. I need to get the edited material from the time line to BetaSp deck."
Hold up a minute...if you are editing on Avid and CineForm, you are no longer in HDV, you've transcoded. The HD timeline that you have in each of these cases will not output an HDV datastream out of the FW port, you would have to encode it all back to MPEG2 HDV and output it to an HDV tape, and then play it out of the HDV camera>HD Connect LE> BetaSP, which will cost you quality.
My personal recommendation would be to figure out what the highest quality methods of downconverting inside your systems are, and do that...then output as SD to Beta SP. I'm not sure what the status is of uncompressed support in the SD Connect box, but I think that some method of output through the SD Connect box to Beta SP would be best...hopefully avoiding DV compression if at all possible.
Not to knock Convergent Design (I use these devices myself), but long-term, your best bet might be to get some sort of I/O card that handles a higher quality signal in analog component or HDSDI and output from that as FW only carries DV or HDV (or, on a Mac, DVC ProHD) for output to tape.
Re: HDV to BetaSP by Tim Kolb on Oct 9, 2007 at 6:01:45 pm
[Tim Kolb]"Hold up a minute...if you are editing on Avid and CineForm, you are no longer in HDV, you've transcoded. The HD timeline that you have in each of these cases will not output an HDV datastream out of the FW port, you would have to encode it all back to MPEG2 HDV and output it to an HDV tape, and then play it out of the HDV camera>HD Connect LE> BetaSP, which will cost you quality."
Just to clarify...you could render (conform, whatever each software company calls it) the timeline to HDV and output to the HD Connect LE and convert to BetaSP, but that conversion back to HDV has to be in there somewhere. An Avid or CineForm HD timeline cannot be spacebar-played out via FW without recompressing to HDV MPEG.
