I was wondering if anyone had any experience having their miniDV movie transferred to Beta SP for festival screening.

Does anyone have insights about aspect ratio? Is BetaSP naturally 4:3 like other video formats?

-Matthew

SP is 4:3. It's really a terrible format for screening from, especially to a big screen as it has the lowest "resolution" of all the broadcast formats available, but it is everywhere and very common.

A good DV to SP dub should look great. If it looks fine on the DV master, there's no reason why the SP dub won't look as good as SP can look. You're far better off dubbing (or better still mastering) to digibeta though, which like DV will handle an anamorphic widescreen quite nicely.

Graeme

You can record 16x9 on a Beta SP as long as the camera allows it.
My work horse camera is a sony D35WS and a PVV3. It produces
image quality way better than tipical mini dvs such as DVX100
and Canon XLs.

Alexandre.

Alexandre, you're confusing tape format with camera. The original poster is asking about a mastering format, not what to shoot on.

Graeme