Hi guys,

I'm in at the deep end with post workflow on a S16 short I've directed and could really do with some advice.

We did a telecine from S16 to Digibeta and gave the tapes to the post production company. They put the rushes into FCP at DV quality for an offline - but then they had to pull out of doing the edit because of other (paying) work.

They dumped the DV quality rushes onto my external hard drive. I dumped them into a project on an iMac (1 and a half gig running FCP 5.0.1) and have completed the offline edit and sound mix.

BUT now I need to do the online. Will my system handle it if I hire a digibeta player for the weekend and simply try to plug and play? According to the FCP manual all I need to do is create a new project / sequence correctly and then batch capture from the digibeta. But I'm new to mac's and online's - and digibeta - and I'm not sure if I'm biting off more than I can chew.

Any advice much appreciated,
Marco

I don't think your iMac will be able to take a direct input from the DigiBETA player. Someone with more experience may be able to correct me here but I am not sure if most digibeta transport footage over firewire - generally they output 10 bit 4:2:2 uncompressed signal which you then import using a high end capture card. Also even if you get a deck that does output firewire at close to full colourspace (impossible? probably) I doubt it will output timecode which means you won't be able to do a proper conform.

You might find a deck which has an output to firewire that someone convinces you will work - but I would say that there would be a 99.99% likelihood in that case that it's just doing a live convert to a DV signal so you aren't actually doing an 'online'.

Plus, then you would need the necessary storage space to handle the 10bit uncompressed footage.

In essence - the answer is no. You will need to find a post house who can do a proper online.

What Craig said.

Digibeta decks don't have firewire connections, so you will need a capture card like the AJA I/O to capture the footage. But then the uncompressed 10-bit footage will require a RAID array to capture to and play back without dropping frames. Firewire drives will not do. So in this instance you will not be able to do this with an iMac.

There is the J-30 deck, that has firewire out, but then you are compressing the footage down to DV resolution, and that is no better than what you already have.

Find another post facility. Onlining takes a lot of knowhow and proper equipment.