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Topic: Digi-Beta connections.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 04-16-2014 04:11 AM
Scott, let me explain what this is about. I received an e-mail yesterday evening asking if the cinema could screen Digi-Beta. My reply was that we didn't have a player, and we're never likely to given the price of the things, but if somebody wanted to provide one for a show we could probably get it on screen. Hire rates for the most basic playback only models seem to start at about 80 pounds per day, plus 20% VAT, so that would be affordable. We certainly couldn't buy one, we might just about be able to afford a secondhand VHS! Also, I can't imagine that there's much being produced today that might possibly be shown in a cinema that is being shot in SD, so any need for one is likely to be extremely infrequent.
SD-SDI should not be a problem, I have a box which can convert any form of SDI, up to 3G, to HDMI and I can put that into the DVI input on the Cine-IPM. I've done this in the past, and it works. I don't have a SDI de-embedder however, so embedded audio only would be a problem. I have the matching balun transformers to convert both ways between the two flavours of AES, so that wouldn't be a problem either, but if needed then I'd need to look them out; I haven't used them for several years.
I briefly spoke to the person who asked the question last night. He's hoping that it this, whatever 'this' may be, comes off then he can get it in some other format, but if it is only available in Digi-Beta then it should be possible. Do you know what the most basic playback only model which does provide AES output in either form is?
If something isn't available as a proper DCP then my own preference is generally to run it on a laptop. I know a lot of people don't like this, but I've never had any problems with it. Laptops are cheap, so you don't have to hire them, they're small and light, I have two, so I've got a backup, I've used them before so I know that they work with the equipment in the cinema and since I already have them I can test in advance if the file gets to me in time.
When we re-opened the cinema last month with 'Basically, Johnny Moped' the director, Fred Burns, offered us various formats, including Digi-Beta and HD-Cam. Digi-Beta seems strange, why would we want to use a SD format for something shot in HD? We opted for a file to play on a laptop and it ran fine. I had to use the new laptop as the file was 100 GB for 77 minutes, I think it played at about 170 Mb/s, and the processor in the old laptop just couldn't keep up with it. We did have a MPEG4 copy running on something else as a backup, but it was't needed. The only problem with playing from laptops which I've seen at several festivals is things unexpectedly popping up on screen, but that's not difficult to avoid if you set it up properly.
Anyway, it looks like we should be able to do this, without it being too expensive, if we need to. I'll be seeing him at a meeting this evening to discuss programming for July, I'll ask him what he's thinking of screening.
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Geoff Newitt
Film Handler
Posts: 49
From: FARINGDON, OXFORDSHIRE, UK
Registered: Dec 2011
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posted 04-16-2014 08:38 AM
We do - or used to do - quite a lot of screenings from DigiBeta. It's a surprisingly popular format for festival-type films. I guess because it was fairly widely adopted.
PAL DigiBeta looks surprisingly good; I only ever saw one NTSC tape and that didn't look so hot.
I think all bar one of the decks we own are the component model, and we've never invested in a de-embedder to extract audio from SDI. So far, everyone's been happy with two of the analogue audio outputs matrixed. In fact, most tapes I've seen have two tracks as Lt/Rt (often 'stereo mix' in video jargon) and two as a hard stereo 2.0, you can select which pair to 'monitor' and adjust the gain with the headphone volume control, if memory serves. (I'm talking about the J-3, J-30, J-30S.)
And we've always used a scaler, even for our solitary J-30S.
For films supplied as computer files, I can recommend DCP-o-matic (there's a thread on here somewhere about it) - and not just because its author Carl is a former employee of ours. A number of Picturehouses use it, and it's quite user friendly. It works best if you have plenty of time and/or access to lots of computer power as it can be a little slow.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-16-2014 09:52 AM
quote: Geoff Newitt
It's a surprisingly popular format for festival-type films. I guess because it was fairly widely adopted.
It was the standard recording and editing format for standard def broadcast TV applications from the mid '90s through to the late-00s, and so there are still a lot of tapes about. However, even though it is now essentially obsolete, decks were never made in vast quantities, the volume of media in circulation and needing to be migrated for archival preservation is still big, and therefore VTRs remain in demand and thus expensive to buy - even second hand and with high head hours.
I'm guessing that the show which Stephen might have coming up is of a high-end TV show or low to medium-end feature film or indie documentary type thing made during the '00s, for which a digibeta will have been made at the end of the post-production process for festival screenings, pitching to DVD publishers, etc. etc. Even at the little theatre I ran at the University of Leeds, we'd get two or three such shows a year. Since the department I worked in owned a deck, we would normally capture it to a high bitrate H.264 file if we could get our hands on the tape ahead of time and show it from a PC in the booth we'd made up specifically for playing DVDs, BDs (it contained three optical drives with different region combinations) and files. If not, we put the VTR in the booth and used component (analogue) video out.
Digibeta is an annoying combination of an obsolete format that refuses to die totally, and one for which VTRs remain stubbornly expensive.
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