HDV to Betacam

I have produced a 30 minute Thai-language documentary movie called "Save the Coral Reefs of Thailand". It was shot, mainly underwater, on a Sony HDV camcorder in the HDV 1080i format. It has now been edited using FCP 6.02 and compressed on DVD in MPEG2/AC3 (16:9 LB) format.

A local TV channel has said they want to broadcast the documentary. But they want it in "Betacam" format.

Now, I don't know enough about Betacam to even ask intelligent questions, let alone plan a conversion.

Help!

Is it possible to get from an FCP HDV timeline into Betacam? How?

Do I need to ask the broadcaster some qualifying questions about their Betacam requirements? What should I ask?

Do I need to send the video (in what format?) to a conversion house to transform it to Betacam? What sort of company can do this?

All help gratefully received...

Regards
Peter

Hi Peter,

First thing to do is to contact the TV channel and ask them to send you their technical delivery sheet. This document has the technical specifications for any tapes that you deliver to a station for broadcasting. Each TV station has its own technical specifications.

With this document you contact a conversion house that will do the HDV-Betacam conversion for you. You could also do the conversion yourself if you have an HD-SDI video card and rent a Beta studio deck, but as you don't have any experience with this it will be easier and cheaper for you to outsource this job.

Once you have found a conversion house they will tell you how they wish you to deliver the HDV master:

- If they have an HDV studio deck you can just make an HDV tape from your FCP project and they will play the HDV tape out to Betacam following the technical specifications of the TV station.

- If they don't have HDV hardware you can convert your HDV timeline to an Uncompressed 8-bit SD QT movie (will be a huge file), put it on a hard drive and bring the drive to them to play the file out to Betacam tape.

Just contact the conversion house with the specification sheet and they will tell you what to do.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hi Ronny,

Thank you for taking the time for a comprehensive response.

I now have an action plan:

- spend the weekend getting the video prepared:
- take an Apple ProRes HQ export and import it into a new 4:3 timeline in FCP
- run through the timeline adjusting the scale and position of the image to optimise for 4:3
- export an uncompressed 8-bit SD QT movie
- copy it to an old Firewire drive (hopefully 80 Gb should be big enough)
- on Monday, get the tech specs from the TV station
- find a conversion house in Bangkok and take the Firewire drive to them for conversion.

Does this sound right?

Regards
Peter

Hi Peter,

Here's an address in Bangkok for you:

www.the-post-bkk.com

They are a high-end post facility with Flame, Inferno, Nitris stations.... Last time I was there they also had an FCP5 station running KonaHD, so that could work for you.

If you already have an Apple ProRes HQ export, why not ask the facility if they can handle this ? A decent conversion facility will have good hardware conversion equipment, which will do the downscaling much better than you can do in FCP.

By the way, why would you want to rescale and pan/scan your HDV timeline to 4:3 ? Are you sure the local tv station does not accept Beta anamorphic, or 4:3 SD widescreen with black bars on top and bottom ? First and above all make sure you have their specs, then only start doing whatever is required to meet these specs.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Thanks again, Ronny.

I have sent an email to the-post-bkk and will await their response.

The TV station might accept widescreen with black bars, but would it not look better if I manually adjusted the video to maximise the screen space? Given that we are trying to get several broadcasters to air the video, if I take the time to produce a 4:3 version, it might be better accepted. Besides, I've got nothing better to do this weekend...

Regards
Peter

Hi Peter,

If the doc has been shot with 4:3 full-screen conforming in mind you won't have much trouble making a 4:3 version, so yes that's a good idea. With all this consumer HD hype going around one easily forgets that a vast majority of the world's population watches regular SD.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hi Ronny,

About 80% of the footage was shot underwater with wide-angle lens. Keeping a housed video camera stable underwater with the water movement is always challenging, so you tend to avoid tightly framing the subject. So, for most of the sequences, it is possible to scale up to fill the frame therefore cropping off the sides. I have to key-frame back to letterbox for the animation and text overlay sections. I've done the first 10 minutes and, if I make the key-frame transitions slow and in the right places, you can hardly notice that it is going from full frame to letterbox. Should be able to get the remaining 20 minutes done tomorrow. I am hopeful that the extra pixels of the source video will avoid any loss of quality from the scale up.

Good night.

And, once again, thanks for your advice and recommendations.

Regards
Peter