Daniel Smith

Digibetas are generally used for capture and intermediate storage in the broadcasters I've worked for, for standard definition applications. HDCAM-SR for most HD, or DNxHD, as many more people are using EVS for studio capture/insert playback.

To be honest though at least it gives you a rough approximation of exposure, which is better than trusting a monitor with a 100x10^200 contrast ratio where even the sun looks correctly exposed.

Hi, I'm not involved with this personally (I was the engineering manager for Ravensbourne 2011) but I thought I'd help out share the stream for the end of year degree show from Ravensbourne. Run mostly by second year students. http://www.ravensbourne2012.com/live

Apologies wasn't really thinking about portability.. Check out the 'Test Chest' or try Phabrix.

Could possibly find an SD-SDI Tektronix second hand for a reasonable price. Failing that, there's some Tektronix rasterizers around for an even more reasonable price that have VGA outs. It's just that BT.601/709 difference in down conversion I'd be wary of.

Nothing wrong with liking it at all, I can completely understand the artistic use of analogue mediums. It's just it sounded like you were totally obscuring your own argument beyond any logical sense to prove analogue formats were factually better, something I wouldn't have a problem with if you could back it up.

Could you explain this a little more or provide any objective test results?

On that note, if anybody's interested it's definitely worth looking up ingress protection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code Most 16a cee-forms are IP44, but you sometimes see IP67. Was quite a challenge during the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race trying to keep everything safe. Fortunately the yellow cee-forms are designed with a slightly different 'key' shape and won't connect with blue cee-forms, even though they look the same (the notch that normally indicates up or down is rotated around 180 degrees.)

Sorry, this was too good not to share

It's often the small but key things that get overlooked. A beautifully shot film - graded by the director on a £150 TFT. An amazing drama - no sound-post, let alone ADR. Or better yet, ADR with no-alignment. I'm hardly one to talk but generally the better productions I've worked on have normally been where the guys in charge have had both technical and creative competence. I think my biggest grief is still the way people think it's acceptable to grade 4th generation dubs and expect to pull HDR results out of it. I don't know of any official details from SMPTE surrounding 6G-SDI but please let it not accept any form of interlacing, at all, whatsoever. (Please excuse the tangent.)

As long as you're sure whatever's coming down the 4-pin XLR is rated respectively it shouldn't be an issue. Buzz the cores out and test for positive polarity with a multimeter before plugging it in, better safe than sorry with power.

I can understand keeping the original negative, when scanning methods improve there may be value in re-scanning the original negatives and restoring them, as in the case of the 'Jaws' video posted in this thread. However to scan the film, re-edit/touch and then burn back to film, and then re-scan, it's the difference information I'd be interested to see before and after this process. Is any quality lost during the transfer to film and back/is the film format able to retain picture detail with the same strict quantisation levels found in digital. I'm not referring to quantisation in the sense that film has binary values, but in the sense of, is the format able to retain picture detail to a finer accuracy than say for instance, a 14-bit scanning system, how much does it drift, how linear in nature is the loss (if any.) Like I said, I'm not saying film does drift or isn't accurate enough, but I'd still be interested in seeing test results before and after.

I'd still be interested in viewing difference mattes between film before archival and after re-scan. No one stores high value content on one LTO tape, nor one hard disk, so making comparisons between one LTO tape or one hard disk VS a roll of film isn't a practical comparison. Data redundancy by today's standards makes digital archival achievable theoretically for as long as we want it to. What attracts me at least to digital archival over film is having the confidence that I'll get back exactly what I put in. Which is why I'd be interested in seeing PQA results between pre-archived material stored on film and then after archival and re-scan. You could probably argue that if quality was lost it was due to the re-scan not the negative, an optical to digital process I would assume will improve in years to come (a process improving faster than the deterioration of the negative.) Admittedly I have very little experience with film, but I remain unsure about its ability to retain picture detail within such discrete quantisation levels found in digital systems, for instance 14-bit scanners - from archival through till re-scan.

I doubt this will be worth it because of the postage costs but I always shop bryant-unlimited.co.uk. I've always got a good deal there.

I can see the value in that film is able to retain the quality of its pictures for many years, in comparison to hard drives for instance in which from my experience last around 5 years (normally because of mechanical failure - but not that SSD's are much better.) I think you're right in that it's more worthwhile for material with high economic life, I think the process of transferring to film and back isn't as flexible as accessing data held on a RAID array, although in the context of archival I don't think flexibility is necessarily an important factor, and when you're Twentieth Century Fox dealing with the original prints from 'Star Wars', I don't think the cost of doing so is an issue.