Clean Copies, One Generation to the Next (page 2)

The better the original, the slower the generation loss, so here are four strategies for creating primo-quality camera tapes:

• Use a premium format. DV, Hi8 and S-VHS tapes deliver higher resolution and cleaner colors than regular VHS and 8mm formats.
• Select a three-chip camera. Three imaging CCDs are better than one, both for resolution and for clean color separation.
• Use high-quality tape, meaning a regular grade from a major manufacturer. However, it's very difficult to see any significant quality improvement from the more expensive tape grades, so save your money and stick with the regular grade.
• Provide ample lighting, to record well-saturated colors and avoid the grain added by a low-light camcorder setting (this setting is usually called "gain" or "gain up"). At the other extreme, use a faster shutter speed and/or a gray neutral density filter in ultra bright snow or beach locations. This will keep colors from "blooming" and smearing.

With the quality of your source tapes optimized, look next at the edit master you'll assemble from them.

If image decay is caused by noise, high frequency loss, and signal split, you can minimize two out of three of these gremlins by the way you cable your editing components together.

First, use the shortest, fattest, best quality cables you can get. Three-foot cables are ideal. That's because high frequency signal loss is increased by electrical resistance. The longer the distance a signal must travel and the narrower its copper highway, the more resistance there is to its flow.

Quality jacks and plugs are equally important. Even with the best connectors, you should check them frequently and clean the actual connecting surfaces with solutions obtainable from electronics supply houses.

To combat split signal loss, use two strategies. First, cable all video components with S-video lines. S-video ports accept the separate luminance and chrominance signals and ship them that way to the next piece of hardware, which continues to process them. If every cable from source deck through processing boxes to record deck is S-video, your editing setup will never split, combine and re-split the video signals and you won't see as much color shifting and smearing.

Even with S-video connectors, analog editing still involves multiple processing steps as your source deck, titler, special effects generator and record deck operate on the video signal. Each of these operations subtly degrades signal quality and collectively, several processors can make a big difference, even with S-video connections between them.

You can't get rid of source and record decks, of course, but you can yank the other boxes out of the loop when they're not needed. Don't leave your titler between source deck and switcher when you're not titling. If you're really finicky, take that switcher out as well until you need a scene transition.

Incidentally, you can obtain signal routing switchers to do the job without swapping cables, but unless they're high quality, their own jacks and internal switches may degrade the signal as badly as the boxes they're switching out of the signal path.

One last hint: many monitors have both inputs and outputs, so it's tempting to cable from the source deck to the monitor and then out again. Don't. Instead, use a second set of VCR outputs or an RF connector that dead-ends at the monitor, while sending the working signal through another output directly to the next editing component. Remember, image quality is not a priority for source monitors. You only need to check quality on the record monitor, and you can cable it from the record deck without degrading image quality because it's downstream of the recording process.

But no matter how hard you work to limit quality loss from one generation to the next, you'll never eliminate it completely. The obvious strategy, then, is to require as few generations as possible between camera original and release tape.

At the front end of the editing process, use only first-generation camera originals. If you employ A/B-roll editing, you may need to make a duplicate tape to use as a B-roll if you didn't plan ahead and shoot a separate B-roll tape. But if you do so, use the second-generation roll only for the incoming shots of A/B transitions; then revert to A roll exclusively for straight-cut edits.

Next, limit yourself to three generations if you possibly can: camera original, edited program master and release tape(s). Even with plain vanilla VHS originals, you can usually achieve acceptable quality in a third generation dupe.

If you frequently need to make several release tapes, consider investing in at least one additional VCR. Acceptably good copy decks are now available for under $150. Setup is easy if your VCR has multiple outputs. If not, an inexpensive distribution amplifier will let you feed two or more copy decks from a single source.

And for even better quality, consider multiple second generation copies. Making automated clones of your edit master is easy if you have an edit controller that can remember every shot and transition and build a duplicate second generation tape unattended.

If you need just a small number of final copies--say two or three--the extra effort involved in making duplicate masters may be worth it.

• Digg This!
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit