This IS the Avid L2: The details are important > Re: [Avid-L2] U-matic to digital transfers, NYC area

Thursday, August 4, 2016

The details are important > Re: [Avid-L2] U-matic to digital transfers, NYC area

The 'friendly neighbor' Greg refers to would be us, at KTe: Kitchen Table Editorial. We enjoy working with him and his Team. :)
Please contact Greg for more info.

FYI...

The thing that you want to be careful of, being that with archival materials, it may be the very last time you have access to each tape:

1. Is the archivist/dub house using the best quality connector on the back of the machine for both picture and sound? 3/4-inch is a heterodyne, color-under system, and there are Y/C (the black and white luminance of the picture *Y"; and then the chroma color laid on top of it "C"). You can take a Composite (mixed together) output, digitize that, up-scale it to HD, etc., but it is best to use a Y/C separation, run that through a Frame Sync/Time Base Corrector (to stabilize the analog errors), and THEN digitize it.

If your U-Matic is SP, many dub houses will play it on a cheaper non-SP and not tell you; the picture quality on an SP machine is much higher than non-SP U-matics. The technology was incorporated into the ubiquitous 3/4-inch U-Matic cassette at the same time when Sony moved BetaCam to Betacam SP (Superior Performance).

2. What "options" may have been used for the recording? I've talked at length about not liking the add-on options on video recorders, because when tapes are made with them, you can't play them back. e.g., on 3/4" U-Matic SP (Superior Performance) tapes, there were DOLBY and High Quality TBC option cards, oven costing thousands. Naturally, most recordings are made without them but some were. The cards are rare.

We at KTe buy all options for this very purpose. TC-Fox found 1-inch Type C (reel-to-reel) videos that were made with a special Dolby A/SR (spectral) card, and a High Quality TBC for playback. Both those cards were an extra $12k each for the 1-inch machines. Ditto, special 3-hour load reels so HBO could fit an entire movie on ONE reel rather than splitting them on two, (2) hour reel loads. That required a special modification of the 1-inch machine raising the hub motors and adjusting torque, tension, etc.

Best,
keoni tyler.
Kitchen Table Editorial * Hollywood-Beverly Hills
keoni.tyler.KTe@gMail.com
310.360.0228

1-inch Type C, the last 3rd generation models made by Sony, with all optional cards, one Sync Head version (BVH-3000) and one non-sync head (BVH-3100):

---In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, <eatapc@...> wrote :

Thanks for the info, Greg. I've recommended that my friend contact you. His name is Tom Heany. http://amzn.to/2axiXU8

To answer Richard's question, Tom is planning to donate the videos to a museum. At this point, I'm helping him but not doing any editing of the material, so questions of editorial workflow are a bit premature. I warned him that at some point someone will need to make decisions about digital formats.

Take care -- Mark Block

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Posted by: film35hd@yahoo.com

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