Alternatives to the BrightEye 75 From the Same Brand.

[dellsam34]

Ensemble Designs made the famous BrightEye 75 (BE75) for capturing analog video into digital, Some people have doubts about their capability to capture consumer video tape formats, I have demonstrated it here and on my YT channel numerous times, I showed its picture quality and its TBC and Macrovision handling to the best of my knowledge, As a result I got a lot of questions about what other models from the same brand that can achieve the same results due to the cost and availability of the BE75, The short answer is no, there is no other model works the same way by itself, However, there is a way to achieve the same functionality by combining two devices made by the same company, Either BE1 or BE3 connected with the BE20. BE1 has an optical out for digital video, not needed for this purpose, It's the only difference between the BE1 and BE3.

I though about making this thread to point people here for answers, Technically this should work exactly the same way as a stand alone BE75 but I did not try this myself, Though at this point of time, even the BE1 and BE3 are also becoming hard to find.

BrightEye 1 (BE1) is an analog capture device that converts any SD or HD analog video signal into digital video SD or HD, It has built in TBC, It has BNC sockets for analog and digital video, and an extra optical out for digital video, Here is the user manual.

BrightEye 3 (BE3) is an analog capture device that converts any SD or HD analog video signal into digital video SD or HD, It has built in TBC, It has BNC sockets for analog and digital video, Here is the user manual.

BrightEye 20 (BE20) is a 4 channel analog and digital audio embedder or disembedder, But we only need the analog audio embedding function for this purpose, If your source is Stereo you can use only Ch1 and Ch2 out of the 4 audio channels, Here the user manual.

Here is a block diagram of how the BE1 or BE3 should be connected to the BE20, The manufacturer used a BE2 as an example so I changed it to BE3 for demonstration purposes as the BE2 does not have the TBC feature:




Here is a block diagram on how the BE20 embeds analog audio into an SDI digital stream, I altered it to show how the analog audio is digitized and embedded into the SDI stream:




Here is the pinout of the analog audio input serial port of the BE20, A cable can be easily made from an old serial cable and a red/white RCA audio cable, One thing to note here, the inputs on the BE20 are for balanced audio/video equipment, to connect a consumer unbalanced device such as a VCR you would need to short out the (-) and (G) pins according to the manufacturer, but proceed at your own risk:




And after reviewing all the documents I came up with my own customized diagram:




One power supply only can be used if you choose to make this as a single device but requires some modification, Ensemble Designs even made an enclosure to put two BE devices into a single case, Like this one, You just have to unscrew the front and back panels panels, insert the PCBs into the single case and re-install the front and back panels screws on the new case.

Hope this addresses the concern.

[lollo]

Excellent post, thanks a lot!

[dellsam34]

Something like this can be used for a single power supply but do check power requirement first, One power supply may not be adequate enough to power up two devices:

[Sharc]

Though at this point of time, even the BE1 and BE3 are also becoming hard to find.....

Maybe here. They claim to have acquired Ensemble Designs/BE in 2024. Not sure about availability of the products though.
https://plurainc.com/solutions/signal_processing/?fwp_series_signal_processing=brighteye

[aramkolt]

To add, the brighteye products don't all work quite the same. Spec-wise, they do have different bit ADCs, but really all of them convert at a higher bit depth than you'd capture (12-14 bit), so that probably doesn't matter a ton.

I believe only the BE5 (composite to composite) and BE25 (composite to SDI) will pass an NTSC blue screen from a standard JVC VHS VCR, or that's been my experience anyway. However, I've never tried a BE1 to comment on that one. I believe the issue is that the units "auto select" whether the input is PAL or NTSC and being that the blue screen is technically neither, so the others don't know what to do with it. I'm not sure why the BE5 and BE25 don't have that issue. Usually VCRs can have the blue screen disabled, but I'm not sure if that is the case for all. The other units probably can pass other blue screens like PAL as I believe Delisam hasn't run into that problem on his BE75, but something to be aware of.

BE5 is composite to composite and the BE25 is composite to SDI with audio embedding. Not as ideal in terms of not having S-Video input.

BE5 is hard to beat cost-wise if you're capturing composite since they can be had for $150 on ebay, so you kind of have to weigh whether the potential quality bump of S-Video and/or SDI is worth spending 5-8x as much or more (retail price on most of these was around $1200+ even when new). For many, it is worth the extra cost, but they still can't find them because people that have them don't seem to want to sell them, or perhaps, not many were made to begin with.

[dellsam34]

Though at this point of time, even the BE1 and BE3 are also becoming hard to find.....

Maybe here. They claim to have acquired Ensemble Designs/BE in 2024. Not sure about availability of the products though.
https://plurainc.com/solutions/signal_processing/?fwp_series_signal_processing=brighteye

Still the same staff, same products, they have just been acquired by a new company, Even if they still have these products it will be in the $1000 range, This is why used units are highly sought after.

I do see new updates for the control software of the device, Ensemble Designs stopped at 3.0.2, I see now 3 more versions, Wonder if it fixes the USB 3.0 freezing issues. Note, USB 2.0 works fine for viewing and controlling the device's menus.

[dellsam34]

@Aramkolt

I don't think the VCR menu matters beyond accessing it for changing settings, It's been a while since I used it so I can't remember the details, I do remember that I was able to access both PAL and NTSC menus if a tape is playing or something along those lines.

Yes BE25 is a perfect device for composite only formats such as LD and u-Matic.

These devices where acquired only by professionals on a special order basis, So when studios started to transition to HD these things got dumped in recycling facilities and dump sites, very few survived by junk collectors and got sold online, initially sold very cheap (less than $200) but when they got to the 2nd and 3rd hand, prices started to go up. It looks like the supply has been dwindling, and yes not a lot of them were made to begin with.

The purpose of acquiring these devices back then was to keep running the old analog studio gear when digital transmission was mandated by the FCC here in the US, It's a cost cutting solution compared to changing the entire studio to digital, Also they were used by some studios to digitize old tape format to Digital tape (D1, D2 ....) and Digibeta. Computers back then were not capable of capturing full frame D1 real time video and were too expensive anyway, To give you a perspective of how slow they were, film studios were rendering few minutes of full frame D1 overnight, that's how slow they were.