telecine to disk vs. telecine to digibeta?
 

hey all -- i’m about to edit a 16mm music video on finalcut... for my final dvd and digibeta deliverables, i’m wondering what the smarter choice would be -- telecine uncompressed QT to disk, or telecine to digibeta?

in the end, would a telecine to uncompressed QT somehow yield a noticeably higher image quality than a telecine to digibeta?

and assuming i’m going to pay someone to handle the online -- would i be saving a significant amount of money pulling master footage right off the hard disk during the online edit, avoiding the cost of digitizing from a digibeta deck?

and are there any other advantages to having uncompressed masters on disk? e.g. would it give the online editor more room to maneuver (in terms of color correction and effects) than if he/she had to work off of digibeta masters?

thanks!

Who is doing your online and on what system? You might want to ask them what workflow is the best for them and to test things out beforehand if necessary.

If they are on Final Cut too, then get it transferred to disk (your system will need to be fast enough) and then you can use Media Manager (aka media mangler) to copy your project over. Or keep it all on a single drive and then bring that into their system.
Sometimes Media Manager has bugs in it and will screw things up and not copy things right. So that's something to watch out for.

Other online systems may not (probably won't) handle Quicktime uncompressed in a way that all the cuts transfer over easily and the online system understands the uncompressed codec (whichever codec it is).

Digibeta is technically lightly compressed, but I don't think you're going to see a huge difference either way.

the question is : if you get the movie on a DIGIBETA tape, what you would do with ?
the fact that data are on disk doesn't means anything about what kind of data you will get.
In this case you need to ask how they will transfer the movie to disk (what hardware and software and settings) are involved.
the parameters are CODEC (intraframe compression or not), bandwith, luma/color ratio ( example 4:2:2), bit depth (8/10/12 and if 12, not 8 in 12 with 0s for padding).
then you can compare with DIGIBETA (a DCT-compressed component video signal at 10-bit YUV 4:2:2 sampling in NTSC (720×486) or PAL (720×576) resolutions at a bitrate of 90 Mbit/s )

i have some 16mm to digibeta tapes here - at the same time i had them strike a DVcam copy ... i'm on a PC ...
well it's not easy getting Digibeta captured to hard drive.. i have finished editing the projects using the Dvcam tapes ...
i did have one of the digibeta captured on a Avid - i received both 8bit & 10 bit uncompressed QT ... the 8 bit i can use on my PC but the 10bit i cannot - they are a avid type MFX ( or is it MXF) file .. i've tried loading in the free Avid codec's but still no 10bit ..

from what i recall FCP reads 10bit YUV clips and 8bit RGB ...
i say you look into having it captured to 10 bit ProRes files then you know your getting the full 10bit 4:2:2 and they'll play in FCP time line ...

I work at a telecine transfer house that transfers direct to disk. We do 35mm,16mm, super8 to any codec (10 bit uncompressed HD down to SD pro-rez). We run Final Cut systems but we also have an Avid Media Composer system for conversion to mxf. This side of our business is continually growing more and more. Last year we only went to drive every once in a while, now its almost preferred.
BTW, I spend alot of time with different codecs etc. and Its really hard for me to see the difference between 8-bit uncompressed and 10bit uncompressed. We have a colorist with 30 years experience here and I don't think he can always see the difference either.
8bit SD can go directly to any mediocre firewire 400 drive. 10bit requires a decent FW800 drive or a raid system, so thats another thing to consider. Some transfer houses in our area require anything above DVCPro 50 to go to their raids (which of course is an extra charge). We don't so we're getting more business.

There is no quality trade-off going direct to drive. And there's no tape cost either :)

In regards to the difference between 8-bit and 10-bit on viewing - I agree with this, until the point where you need to push the image in colour correction or start doing heavy effects work on it.

A lot of footage at 10-bit COULD look just the same to 99% of your viewers as 8-bit, (especially when these days it's likely going out to the viewer as a compressed mpeg-2/mpeg-4 stream as either DVD or HD Broadcast or online download.).

However - you WANT 10-bits worth of latitude if you are doing heavy colour correction - get your footaged telecined to that, and if your edit system can't handle 10-bit onlining then also get a DVCAM output to use for offline and do a traditional offline - online workflow.