Outsmarting Sony (or, Stupid U-Matic Tricks!)

[captain18]

So, part of the reconfiguration of my edit suite/man cave has been to recable everything to use S-Video instead of composite video for the highest quality video I can get from my collection of professional and prosumer gear. This was pretty easy on the S-VHS front since that's where S-Video was developed to begin with, and my Betacam deck does S-

Comments

Re: a clue... now perhaps an interpretation???

[captain18]

Actually, taking the chroma off of composite would be an elegant solution, if you think about it. Any TBC by design is going to split the chroma and luma from the composite signal to begin working with it. Since the luma is already S-Video compliant, DPS saved themselves some circuitry by pulling the chroma from composite rather than adding the extra bits to transform the 688 kHz color to 3.58 mHz.

This leaves a question though about just how good the quality of that color signal is. In theory it should be lower from being mixed with the luma but I don't know by how much. In practice it may not be noticeable.

Having the chance to compare the DPS-295 and DPS-210 outputs will be valuable though, to see whether there's a difference in taking the chroma off composite as opposed to decoding it off dub.

For the subcarrier mode, all you need to do is add a cable from the Subcar Output on the DPS-295 to the SC Input on the BVU-950. My best understanding is this forces the VTR to lock the video signal to the TBC's subcarrier. Since the SC acts as color reference, the TBC can slightly alter it to impact the color reproduction.