Re: video conversion question

From: David Tetzlaff (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2006 - 16:10:06 PDT


You do not want to be mucking around with buying a used TBC unless you
know exactly what you are doing. E.g. what you probably need is not a
broadcast TBC which proceses one or two lines at a time, but a
'frame-store' type which holds (natch) a whole frame at once. these are
not necessarily cheap. You should be able to borrow a working Hi8 deck
from somebody...

You say you want to preserve 4;2;2 colorspace. What digital format, then
are you looking to convert to (DVC Pro 50??) how are you you going to
post-produce the material (if at all), and what is the destination. If you
just want to project the tapes and you put them in any 4;2:2 digital
format, you'll need access to a deck in that (quite expensive) format to
play them back, and if you're going to DVD, I'm not aware that the 4;2;2
vs. 4:1:1 difference would be significant next to the MPEG-2 compression
in any affordable DVD authoring program.

It strikes me that a moe sensible approach would just be to find someone
who can dub the tapes from Hi8 to DV, and test out the results. This
should cost next to nothing: If It's only a tape or two I could probably
do it for you for the cost of shipping and tape, as my school lab has a
hi8 deck in our dub rack.

A lot depends on the quality of the Hi8 source tapes. Analog tapes can
deteritorate a lot over the years...

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.