Still In Beta (Literally)

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As part of a project for one of our clients we are digitizing and preparing for the web 30+ hours of documentary footage, a good portion of which is on BetaCam SP tapes. I, being a Final Cut kind of guy, and us, being a fresh new agency, were unprepared for such a demand. A little work on ebay and some electronic fiddling and we now have a rig for digitizing BetaCam tapes to Flash video. The deck is surprisingly tough. It came in shambles, I pieced it back together and proceeded to drop it, on my hand, while putting it on the rack. It didn’t even blink. I can understand why BetaCam was a strong player in the broadcast world, the quality is pretty darn good for a magnetic tape format. And the decks agility with shuttle and jog is surprising.

The actual video editing is done on a G5 with a Cinema monitor and a Bella Final Cut keyboard. The keyboard has a jog wheel on it, and nifty highlighted keys for all the Final Cut commands. I just sent in today for my Final Cut Studio Crossgrade to a Universal Binary because I plan to move a lot of the video editing to the MacBook Pro and let the G5 work as a render farm. Should be fun.