Digi Beta Platform

Anthony Schilling · May 18, 2005

For my next project, i want to work with my films in the digi beta platform. usually i get a mini DV dub that I capture and edit. what capture cards and NLE programs support digi beta capture? right now I use Sony Vegas 5.0. also, I haven't been able to find a digibeta deck or camera in town to rent that i could use for capture.. Is it possible to capture onto an external hard drive at the telecine house?

Stephen Williams · May 18, 2005

Is it possible to capture onto an external hard drive at the telecine house?

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Hi,

If you use a datacine you could get quicktime or DPX files to hard drive. I have done this from a Spirit, but it is more expensive than direct to tape.

Stephen Williams DP

www.stephenw.com

Anthony Schilling · May 20, 2005

I'll be using the Shadow.

Chris Burke · May 20, 2005

Hi,

If you use a datacine you could get quicktime or DPX files to hard drive. I have done this from a Spirit, but it is more expensive than direct to tape.

Stephen Williams DP

www.stephenw.com

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It is not always more expensive. It depends largely on the type of files (resolution) you will be having put on the hard drive and if the telecine house is set up to do this easily. More and more places are offering a tapeless solution. I am about to do this on a short where the transfer house is telecine direct to my FW800 hard drive, Super 16 to uncompressed 10 bit HD, I take the hard drive home, make offlline clips, sync audio, edit and then back to the same telecine house for an online. I am save a lot of money, especially on deck rental. Check around, you may find some place that can do the same for you.

chris

John Mastrogiacomo · May 20, 2005

I am about to do this on a short where the transfer house is telecine direct to my FW800 hard drive, Super 16 to uncompressed 10 bit HD

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Chris,

Where are you going to get this done at? :unsure:

Phil Rhodes · May 20, 2005

Hi,

I've been wondering for ages why this isn't done more, including on cameras. A £50, 200Gb hard disk drive has almost exactly the same capacity as a 30-minute HDCAM-SR tape and is massively cheaper to access, as well as supporting file-based nonlinear access, a multitude of data formats, and other useful things. I mean, what's the decision here? You can even build something that's as fast or much faster than an HDCAM-SR deck, in pure data terms, much cheaper than the VTR.

Phil

Michael Most · May 21, 2005

Hi,

I've been wondering for ages why this isn't done more, including on cameras. A £50, 200Gb hard disk drive has almost exactly the same capacity as a 30-minute HDCAM-SR tape and is massively cheaper to access, as well as supporting file-based nonlinear access, a multitude of data formats, and other useful things. I mean, what's the decision here? You can even build something that's as fast or much faster than an HDCAM-SR deck, in pure data terms, much cheaper than the VTR.

Two words:

Reliability.

Ruggedness.

Not to mention standardized recording formats and real time performance. I don't know any hard drive that's capable of recording 880 megabits per second. Or 440, for that matter. You need arrays for this, not 50 pound single drives.

Phil Rhodes · May 21, 2005

Hi,

I question the idea that hard disk drives are unreliable; I've recently been working with machines that include up to 144 of them and even with that immensely divided MTBF they don't have too many problems.

And a plastic-shelled tape, which falls over as soon as the first speck of dust gets between it and the head, is certainly no more rugged than a hard disk drive.

Performance is another issue, and naturally there's no substitute for an embedded system in some applications. On the other hand, a decent 4+1 RAID-5 will do 110Mbyte/sec for a cost of around £300, which isn't so bad, and most of the time when you're moving data between stations the last thing you want to do is put it out to tape with all the attendant timecode and compression issues just to run it back in again. Plug-in firewire drives are being used all the time right now to move 2K film data between suites and facilities and I can only see this trend increasing.

In fact, it makes me wonder if it'd be worth marketing some kind of easily-portable suitcase RAID to sort out the performance issues inherent therein.

Phil

Michael Most · May 21, 2005

I question the idea that hard disk drives are unreliable; I've recently been working with machines that include up to 144 of them and even with that immensely divided MTBF they don't have too many problems.

You're not lugging them around in production conditions. And "not too many problems" is still unacceptable for an original recording medium. I'm not saying it won't work. I'm saying that nobody has packaged drives in a way that would convince me to trust my production to it, with the possible exception of S.two - which has its own set of problems. Certainly the idea that off the shelf 3 1/2 inch drives alone can be used directly in professional production is, at best, naive, and and worst, wishful thinking.

And a plastic-shelled tape, which falls over as soon as the first speck of dust gets between it and the head, is certainly no more rugged than a hard disk drive.

If part of a tape fails, the rest of the tape is still accessible. If a hard drive fails and the directory is corrupted, you can say goodbye to everything on it. Besides, tape as a recording medium in the field has been proven over a period of at least 30 years, so any statements to the contrary are overlooking reality.

Plug-in firewire drives are being used all the time right now to move 2K film data between suites and facilities and I can only see this trend increasing.

That's post production. You're not dealing with the original masters at that point. Anything that gets corrupted can be replaced. That is not the case during production.

Anthony Schilling · May 21, 2005

Well, I'm hoping to do the transfer to digibeta and keeping the tape as backup.. but while i'm at the telecine suite, capturing from the digibeta to an external drive. thus avoiding a hard to find deck to rent just so I can transfer files. I guess the question is, are external portable drives set up for capture? how can this drive be set up? or would i just be transferring data from the house system? in that case, would it be uncompressed? if so, the last time I checked an uncompressed 5 minute file was about 17GB. I will have about 2 hours of footage.

Phil Rhodes · May 21, 2005

Hi,

If you're talking RAIDs, which you are for any kind of HD, then all your reliability concerns are obviated - and it's still cheaper and easier.

Phil

Michael Most · May 22, 2005

Hi,

If you're talking RAIDs, which you are for any kind of HD, then all your reliability concerns are obviated - and it's still cheaper and easier.

Fine. If you want to do it, then do it. But good luck finding the equipment to make it happen. Nobody other than S.two and possibly Directors Friend (if you can find one) makes a portable hard disk based HD recorder. You can't take drives and magically hook them up to video cameras. You need to have a device that acts as a recorder with some sort of control system. This currently means either taking an entire computer system out with you (that's basically what the S.two is - a ruggedized Windows NT based computer) or cabling to a truck that houses such a device.

The statements here are often based on technical impatience and a lack of understanding of what it takes for certain processes to happen. A disk drive is a very basic data storage device, not a video recorder. That requires a defined signal format, a way of tranporting that format in real time, a protocol for recording it, and a disk controller to allow the disk subsystem to do the recording. You don't get that when you purchase your $150 bare drive. Videotape, on the other hand, is already well defined, well supported, relatively cheap in terms of storage media cost, has proven reliability, and can be directly used by just about any post facility worldwide. This is still 2005, not 2025. Maybe by 2025 we'll have highly evolved versions of the P2 card that store 2 terabytes per card and cost $50. Personally, for field recording, I find the solid state approach far more forward thinking than mechanical hard drives anyway.

Robert Hughes · May 24, 2005

Besides the reliability issue you have the long term storage issue. Disk drives are not archivally sound. They are not meant to be put up on a shelf for 5 years, then started up again. Eventually all disk drives fail, and that timeframe is shorter than that of tape, which itself is not all that wonderful for long term archival storage.

If you want to use your original HD elements in the future you will have to transfer it to tape eventually; why not use it for origination? Cost and transfer time into NLE. So you have to weigh the relative importance of immediacy versus archivability and make your decision on those considerations.

Phil Rhodes · May 24, 2005

Hi,

Sure, but we're talking about postproduction here. Any reference to camera recording has been prefaced with "you could..." or "you can..." Anyway, I'm convinced that basic computer system admin is going to be more and more of a reality in all kinds of fields, so running that field RAID is going to become part of the camera department's job. Convergence... is a bitch.

Phil