Betacam Transfer

Betacam Tape Format

Betacam is a professional videotape format developed by Sony in 1982. Betacam can often refer to either the Betacam camcorder, the tape, the video recorder, or the format itself.

Betacam is an analog component video format, storing the luminance, "Y", in one track and the chrominance, on another as alternating segments of the R-Y and B-Y components performing Compressed Time Division Multiplex, or CTDM.[1] This splitting of channels allows true broadcast quality recording with 300 lines of horizontal luminance resolution and 120 lines chrominance resolution (versus ~30 for Betamax/VHS), on a relatively inexpensive cassette based format.

The original betacam format recorded onto oxide-formulated tape, the same tapes used for betamax recordings. You could actually insert a blank betamax tape into a betcam recording deck, record footage, and vise versa. Betacam is recorded at a much higher speed than betamax. A blank betamax tape that could hold 3 hours of recordings would be reduced to 30 minutes if recorded on a Betacam recorder.

Betacam generally comes in three formats Betacam, Betacam SP, and Digibeta.

Combining Multiple Video Tapes to DVD

When bringing us multiple video tapes, you also have the option of combining your video tapes onto one or multiple DVDs, at no extra cost. Combining several shorter tapes onto one DVD will save you the hassle of having several short-duration DVDs laying around. This can also be useful for combining multiple tapes of similar subject manner, such as transferring all of your children's birthday party videos onto a birthday DVD compilation. The only limitation is that our 100-year archival DVDs will hold up to 2 hours of video, so each combined video must have an average run time of one hour or less.

DVD Compatibility

At DVD Your Memories, we use only the highest quality 100-year archival DVDs for transferring your Betacam to DVD. We are so confident that our Betacam to DVD transfers will work for you that we offer compatibility guarantee on all of our video to DVD transfers! Never again worry about your old DVD player, or a disc read error! All of our discs are guaranteed to work for your television and your home DVD player.

Transferring to Hard Drive Option

Transferring your Betacam to hard drive is recommended if you are going to edit your footage. The file type is NTSC DV AVI, the most standard format across all video editing platforms. Hard drives can be PC or Mac formatted and the file format is AVI DV with each hour of video taking up 13 gigabytes. Other video formats are available through our video conversion services.

If you are going to purchase a hard drive through DVD Your Memories, we will recommend a certain size based on the total length of your video transfer footage. If you are going to bring in a drive, please understand the space requirements and plan accordingly. Also we recommend bringing in a new drive, but if you would like to bring in a drive that has data on, we will ask that you sign a data-loss waiver. We've never lost data on a hard drive, but the possibility always exists.

Video Editing Services

With every order, we will crop out any blank footage found at the beginning and end your tapes. In addition, we will also ask if you'd like us to crop out any television footage if it appears at the end of your tape.

We can also provide additional basic editing services available to all of our video to DVD transfer services. Add an extra touch to your finished DVD by taking advantage of some simple basic edits. We have a few different options depending on the nature of the editing that needs to be performed.

Our basic editing services include small video edits such as pulling out a specific clip in your video, or removing commercials from a recorded TV program of 60 minutes or less. For most basic editing tasks, your video does not need to be transferred to hard drive prior to going to DVD. This is especially helpful if you have long running tapes with only a small section you'd like transferred. With basic editing you can crop out all of the unwanted material, which leaves you with only the clip you want on your final DVD.

For anything more advanced than our basic editing, it will fall under our hourly editing service. To take full advantage of your editing experience, we recommend sitting in with our in-house editor. Prior to editing, your video must first be transferred to hard drive.

Here are some common video editing projects people do:

• If you have several tapes with short clips on each, you can now combine all of the clips you need onto one DVD movie. Our editing service will allow you to pull any amount of footage from your tapes and consolidate them onto a DVD for easy viewing.
• Remove extensive commercials from your recorded television programs. Remove those annoying old commerical breaks from your video tapes, and watch your old programs seamlessly on your new DVD. This is great for special television specials such as sports entertainment, politics, and news footage.
• Combine your video tapes with other media such as film, photos and audio. We can actually take your video tapes and combine them with other types of media to give a much more professional look to your DVD.

Editing From DVDs?

Many customers ask us if they can edit the video footage if we make them DVD movies. The simple answer is no. The complete answer is yes, almost anything is possible if you are an advanced computer user, but for many reasons it is not advisable to do so. The main reason is that you would be working with highly compressed video.

If you transfer the data from the DVD to the computer for editing, the quality is not the same as that of the originally uncompressed video used to create the DVD. It also takes a lot of processing power to edit the compressed video, and although you can fix this problem by converting it to a less compressed video format (such as AVI), you will still see a quality loss. Also when you re-render that video that has previously been on a DVD it will recompress again and you will notice more than a little loss of detail.

• Betacam to DVD
• Betacam SP-S to DVD
• Betamax to DVD
• Hi8, Digital 8, Video 8 to DVD
• MicroMV to DVD
• MiniDV to DVD
• MiniDVD to DVD
• U-Matic to DVD
• VHS to DVD
• VHS-C to DVD