Subject: Re: Doing Lightspeed
From: Manuel Coats <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 00:17:39 -0500

On Sun, 17 Dec 1995, Steve Bowie wrote:
> Now, about 'output to video' - during one of the seminars at the recent
> Toronto WOA, a presenter said basically....Beta, BETA, BETA!!!
> This didn't make me real happy, as I'm hoping shortly to upgrade my VLabMotion
> system to do quite decent SVHS.  Eventually, when I get the as yet
> unavailable MacroSystems 060 (not Warp!) with direct dma access to the VLM,
> the quality of output will no longer be an issue at all.  But in the meantime,
> I was hoping that for non-broadcast purposes SVHS would be adequate.
> So...what do you think, is BETA an absolute must?  When is it not? And, how
> many flavours of Beta are there?  Which one do I want??
> Steve

If you can afford it, Beta is the way to go.  If you get a REALLY good 
SVHS setup, it is difficult to see the difference in quality between SVHS 
and BEta on a 1st generation basis.  When you start going down in 
generations, that's where BetaSP will blow away SVHS, Hi-8 or any of the 
other lwer formats.  We have a little bit of everything here, and I wish 
everybody had BetaSP gear as Lightspeed would look that much better, but 
generally almost everything we receive is on SVHS (2nd generation).  With 
Non-Linear editing quickly becoming main stream, BetaSP decks aren't as 
important as they were in the past.  You now can take all of your 1st 
generation footage and edit it as many times as you want without losing 
generations... and if you dump that back out to SVHS (a good deck) it 
will look great.  If you can afford 8K for a low end beta deck, I would 
say go for it.  These new Digital formats by Sony and Panasonic are 
looking good too.

MC