Do I need video reference to capture audio or video?

[gsilbers]

do i really need house reference if im capturing audio or video from a digibeta? cant the digibeta be set to be in its internal ref. ?

[Eric L]

Originally Posted by gsilbers

do i really need house reference if im capturing audio or video from a digibeta?

No.

Originally Posted by gsilbers

cant the digibeta be set to be in its internal ref. ?

Yes.

Clock your DAW to the AES outs of the Digibeta.

The video capture card can be set to genlock to the incoming video signal.

In both cases it is a closed system where the Digibeta is the master.

[gsilbers]

thats what i thought. thanks!

[gsilbers]

im capturing directly from a mini digibeta machine that has a firewire output into FCP.
does FCP locks to the incoming signal by default or does it need to be set up

[kk@jamsync.com]

Originally Posted by gsilbers

im capturing directly from a mini digibeta machine that has a firewire output into FCP.
does FCP locks to the incoming signal by default or does it need to be set up

Have you ever used FCP before? There are several areas to set up and there are several ways to capture, so if you haven't used it, I'd suggest you check out the manual or some of the training material at kenstone.net. LAFCPUG also has a great FAQ section. I'd suggest capturing audio into FCP also so you can check to see that the two audio sources are really sample locked.

When you say "mini digibeta" do you mean "mini DV"? With digibeta, we usually go via sdi.

If it's miniDV, the video could have been shot any number of ways, including 24p advanced, so you need to check this out.

[gsilbers]

Originally Posted by kk@jamsync.com

Have you ever used FCP before? There are several areas to set up and there are several ways to capture, so if you haven't used it, I'd suggest you check out the manual or some of the training material at kenstone.net. LAFCPUG also has a great FAQ section. I'd suggest capturing audio into FCP also so you can check to see that the two audio sources are really sample locked.

When you say "mini digibeta" do you mean "mini DV"? With digibeta, we usually go via sdi.

If it's miniDV, the video could have been shot any number of ways, including 24p advanced, so you need to check this out.

ive used it a lot. just dont know if it needs t be locked to sync or doesnt need to when capturing video from this device via firewire. we usually have a whole array of D5 and digibetas srs etc and we capture in FCP with a blackmagic card. we used to just capture with QT and it was great until a new upgrade that screwed it up. now we use FCP. thats for the audio guys to work on. if the video dept needs to capture (which they call ingesting) its w avid adrenalin with a terablock with fiber networked. cause those TV shows and movies in HD take a whooollee lotsa space.
so then we started using this digibeta in the "audio side" cause the video is overcrowded w work so there is usually no digis to use. and we need to capture tons of tv and movies.


mini digibeta us just a smaller box than a digibeta and has fewer option than the regular ones and has a firewire output option. so its half the size of a full rack digibeta. its not called mini digibeta. thats how we call it cause its smaller than other ones.

for audio captures we do it normally through PT HD, sync IO.

so im wondering if this firewire digibeta will transmit ref to FCP via firewire.

[kk@jamsync.com]

Originally Posted by gsilbers

so im wondering if this firewire digibeta will transmit ref to FCP via firewire.

FW is a two-way protocol. Locking FCP to any video device with FW generally works.At least, I've recorded from several devices over the years.

By "transmit ref" do you mean "frame edges of audio, video, and TC" are in sync?

If so, I'd say yes, most of the time. However, I've seen several captures on different machines where audio sync was lost and the entire thing had to be recaptured, even when FCP did not warn of dropped frames. This usually happened when the machine had been online for awhile working with other programs. A reboot usually fixes this problem.

We're using P2 cards for audio capture and we'll be working with P2 for video in the near future. Unfortunately, the last upgrade for FCP broke P2 import! So when I give advice, it's always with the caution that certain revisions may not work.

[nucelar]

Hi, we use this mini Digibeta too, it's a sony J-30/SDI (and it's just a player). I has composite, SDI and Firewire DV video outputs.
We capture video and the 4 channels of audio.
Unfortunately, the Firewire signal only contains 2 channels of full bandwith audio, so we must capture video and audio separarately.
For video capture we use BTV Pro, direcly compressing the DV stream to JPEG-A. For audio , we have a 4 channel SDI to AES De-embedder, and capture in sync with pro tools.
Finally we import the movie into the PT session and spot it.

[kk@jamsync.com]

Originally Posted by nucelar

Hi, we use this mini Digibeta too, it's a sony J-30/SDI (and it's just a player). I has composite, SDI and Firewire DV video outputs.
We capture video and the 4 channels of audio.
Unfortunately, the Firewire signal only contains 2 channels of full bandwith audio, so we must capture video and audio separarately.
For video capture we use BTV Pro, direcly compressing the DV stream to JPEG-A. For audio , we have a 4 channel SDI to AES De-embedder, and capture in sync with pro tools.
Finally we import the movie into the PT session and spot it.

Are you using JPEG-A inside of PT? Interesting if that's true. I usually use DV NTSC.

[gsilbers]

we use also mjpegs QTs also. sometimes even h264 but it makes it lag way to much when doing ff and reverse so we stay w mjpeg. seemed the best option for its size vs image quality and was the best in compatibility when we have 25+ people working of the different macs and PT.


yes that mini digibeta only has 2 audio ch which sucks. why not 4 right?
well we do analog out 3-4 into PT in freerun in the same mac and then spot it in PT.
but of course this will be when audio is for reference only as its analog and uncalibrated.

[Geert van den Berg]

Originally Posted by nucelar

Hi, we use this mini Digibeta too, it's a sony J-30/SDI (and it's just a player). I has composite, SDI and Firewire DV video outputs.
We capture video and the 4 channels of audio.
Unfortunately, the Firewire signal only contains 2 channels of full bandwith audio, so we must capture video and audio separarately.

WIth a J-30, if you capture via SDI you can capture 4 channels of audio at once! Might be an economical upgrade to buy a card with SDI input for the computer if you have to load lots of material...

[nucelar]

Originally Posted by Geert van den Berg

WIth a J-30, if you capture via SDI you can capture 4 channels of audio at once! Might be an economical upgrade to buy a card with SDI input for the computer if you have to load lots of material...

Hi Geert!
We do indeed capture everthing at once. We pass the SDI signal through a Lynx P DX 3214 D De-embedder and obtain the four audio channels in AES/EBU format, which we record into PT, slaved to SMPTE.
In parallel, we capture the video (with no audio) with BTV via Firewire, and once finished, spot it to the PT timeline.
A quicker alternative would be to have a Mojo SDI, but AFAIK it captures in a very specific avid codec(mxf), which is an overkill for our requirements & would force us to have one in every room... not cheap!

[Geert van den Berg]

Originally Posted by nucelar

Hi Geert!
We do indeed capture everthing at once. We pass the SDI signal through a Lynx P DX 3214 D De-embedder and obtain the four audio channels in AES/EBU format, which we record into PT, slaved to SMPTE.

That Lynx de-embedder looks like a great idea, I see they offer more of these handy tools, we still need a way to get 4 analog outs from a J30 and I've seen something we could use for that!

Do you have any special reason to record the audio into Pro Tools? We usually ingest the video and audio into one file (can also be captured in seperate files) and when we import the files into PT we extract the audio from that. The video files do get bigger, but we don't really see this in the performance of the video. PT isn't reading the audiotrack from the QT anyway.