Betacam to DVD Conversion

[steve_c]

Hi all, Steve here. Greetings from London UK..

I would like to convert a Betacam SP tape to DVD, assuming I have a DVD writter and a Betacam machine, how would this be done? A step by step rough idea would be great, just so I can get myself started.

Thanks in Advance.

Steve.

[pacoreguenga]

Very simple, Steve.
You need a video capture card installed on your computer able to take the signal from your VTR.
Many Beta SP VTRs have an S-Video output (The UVW series do so) so you can feed an analog video capture card (choices are endless, ranging in prices from $20.00 to $5,000.00)
You can even use a cheap TV Tuner card like the AverTVstudio, which costs about $50.00, and lets you encode directly to MPG2 for DVD authoring. (for best results, use Cyberlink's powervcrII software with it. A $49.00 value)
The you have to demultiplex your mpg file into basic m2v (video) and mp2 (audio) streams in a program like TMPGenc (shareware) and get them into a DVD authoring app like SpruceUp! (demo available on the web) and directly burn to your DVD-R drive.
And that's it.

Now, if you feel fancy about it, you can use an HDCAM multiformat VTR which can take any Betacam format (SP, SX, MPG IMX, Beta Digital, and HDCAM 1035i and 1080i) into an uncompressed video capture card like the TARGA 3000 (maybe with a Cinewave package) installed into a BOXX computer.
Then you can encode with Cinemacraft, Panasonic, or any other expensive encoding software, and author with an expensive program like Sonic Scenarist (the best I've ever used and the last I will ever need), and burn to DVD-R.
Total cost?
How about $200,000.00 ?