General Interest in telecine to hard drive

Brian Rose · July 23, 2006

All,

I've seen that several labs offer a service by which film can be transferred to a mini hard drive, allowing the user to upload his/her footage directly to NLE, as opposed to a BetaSP, or MiniDV or the likes. I've heard much about the improved quality and convenience of such a service, but what are the drawbacks? Are there certain system requirements, or would it work on, say, a Mac G5? Is the added cost worth it for the quality. Any info would be great. I'd love to learn more about it. Thanks!

Brian Rose

Bernhard Zitz · July 24, 2006

Normaly I take my external firewire harddrive to the lab and tell them to put a Quicktime in 10bit 4:2:2 uncompressed on my harddrive. This gives me a DigiBeta-Quality(even better) without the costs for using or renting a DigiBeta-deck.

Uncompressed 4:2:2 takes 5times more space than DV on your hardrive, since harddrives are cheap this doesn't really matter.

Usualy you need a RAID to be fast enough for uncompressed SD in realtime, with the hardrive not to full it can work sometimes on a external firewire hardrive. Anyway with a Mac G5 you can make a internal RAID on a low budget.

If your computer/hardrive can't handle the uncompressed files you can convert it to DV for editing and in the end you'll reconnect it with the uncompressed footage

When it comes to colorcorrection you'll benefit a lot from your uncompressed footage...

A major drawback is that a harddrive isn't very good as backup... if it crashes your footage is gone... I always make a DVtape-backup, that has lower quality, but at least it's save somewhere...

check former posts about this topic...

Peter Egan · July 24, 2006

Hi,

Not to open a new topic, I'll ask here: anyone know any labs in London that do a telecine to hard drive? Is the price astronomical?

Cheers,

P.

Rachel Oliver · July 24, 2006

Hi,

Not to open a new topic, I'll ask here: anyone know any labs in London that do a telecine to hard drive? Is the price astronomical?

Cheers,

P.

Hi;

That's something I've been wondering too, it has not caught on here it seems....

Olly

Douglas Hunter · July 24, 2006

Uncompressed 4:2:2 takes 5times more space than DV on your hardrive, since harddrives are cheap this doesn't really matter..

you sure its only 5 times? In my experience its significantly more than that.

Bernhard Zitz · July 26, 2006

you sure its only 5 times? In my experience its significantly more than that.

sorry I was wrong:

23 seconds of quicktimemovie (720 x 576, 25FPS) are:

77.9MB in DV-PAL

448.5MB in 8bit 4:2:2 PAL (5.75738125802 times bigger)

598MB in 10bit 4:2:2 PAL (7.67650834403 times bigger)

but something is strange, you can read that D1 has 175 Mbit/sec, and DV 25Mbit/sec, so why they say that DV has a 5:1 Kompressionratio?

Michael Collier · July 26, 2006

I believe the 5:1 mostly refers to the cosine compression from the already 4:2:2 source as its proccessed in the DSP. I wouldn't swear to it in court, but I believe thats how they calculate that.

Stephen Williams · July 26, 2006

I believe the 5:1 mostly refers to the cosine compression from the already 4:2:2 source as its proccessed in the DSP. I wouldn't swear to it in court, but I believe thats how they calculate that.

Hi,

DV is not 4:2:2 it's 4:1:1 or 4:2:0

Stephen