Shooting 60i- Beta SP quality?
 

I heard that shooting 60i with the XL2 the quality is almost as good as Beta SP. Comments?

we've passed that milestone a few generations ago with miniDV cams.

I disagree. I have not seen any miniDV camera that can look as good as a HIGH-END Betacam...even the XL2.

The XL2 has by far come the closeest I've seen.

Beta SP is still a little better format than any miniDV camera will ever be. DV is an 8 bit (poor colors) format, and it doesn't even have color info sampled for every pixel. Beta SP has much more information in every aspect and the fact that it's analog doesn't make that information go away.

Joonas, that's totally uncorrect. BetaSP has lower resolution, about the same chroma resolution as DV, and is noisier. Analogue formats are limited by bandwidth and noise. Bandwidth directly equates to resolution - measure the luma and chroma bandwidth of BetaSP, and you'll find the chroma compares favourably to DV, but the luma is way less resolution. Noise is sort of equivalent to bit depth, and given the betaSP noise levels, 8bit is more than enough to do it justice. Note that recording bit depth is not the same as filter calculation bit depth. Even though you might have an 8bit recorded picture, it can still be valuable to calculate filter effects in floating point.

Graeme

hi Graeme !

yep, absolutely right !

a BetaSP/DV comparo clearly shows that DV is a lot cleaner, with more resolution.

most people compare these 2 formats this way: a 2/3" CCDs high end BetaSP against a VX2000 1/3" CCDs mini DV...

the image from the BetaSP will look better than the VX2000 because of the camera section, not because the BetaSP format is better than DV.

now, if people compare a mid priced Beta SP cam with, say, a DVX100A or a XL2
(the best 1/3" CCDs cameras today, i think), they could see that DV can look great.

...camera section is the most important, it is the source.

...if i take some footage in DV mode (format) with the Panasonic SDX900 (2/3" 16:9 CCDs), it will look fantastic.

Hey Antoine!

Spot on! Compare tape format with tape format, DV beats BetaSP on quality, price and size.

Compare camera to camera, and often the camera on the front of the BetaSP back will be better than the camera on the DV, with the lens of the former probably costing more than the whole camera of the latter.

However, compare like with like, and DV is the better tape format.

Graeme

Betacam SP and DV are recording formats. To compare them in any sort of meaningful way, you have to take one camera and output to each format. For example, if you take a DSR500 (now the 570) and record to its internal recorder while at the same time recording via the 26 pin output to a Betacam SP deck, and then compare the two recordings, most people would say the DVCAM recording looks better. But if you compare a $40,000 camera recording in Betacam SP to a $2000 camera recording to DV, then the Betacam is obviously going to look better.

Are we (not pointing to anyone) perhaps mixing up Digibeta with BetaSP?

Uh...not me. Why? I only mentioned the DSR500/570.