I am helping a local church shoot a commercial for TV broadcast (not something that I normally do). I will be shooting with my Canon XL1s and editing in FCP3. Normally, I archive my work to miniDV and I usually output to DVD using DVDSP.

However, the local cable company has requested either DVCPro or Beta for broadcast. I do not own a VTR for either -- nor am I interested in buying/ renting one for this small project.

What are my options? Is the quality of MiniDV roughly equivalent to Betacam (I have seen some debate on this). Since this is only a 30 second commercial, I could output a DV format file in QuickTime to DVD as well. Seems to me that this would be even easier than outputting to a VTR (given my limitations). Any thoughts?

Thx.

-- Rob Frei (rafrei@earthlink.net), April 02, 2003

Answers

Believe it or not, you loose a lot of quality when you compress video to put it on a DVD. DIGI Beta or Beta SP are standard formats for Broadcast TV, that is the equipment they have and that is the format that their processes involve.

What you need to do is master out to your MiniDV tape and then take that to your local DUB shop (I use Lightning Dubs in Los Angeles). They can make a BetaSP copy of your MiniDV tape that you can hand off to the TV station. Good Luck!

-- Bryndon Smith (bryndon22@hotmail.com), April 07, 2003.