[DVtyro]

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

I'm not sure that doubling the color subcarrier would have a marked impact on the color resolution, there is still the overall phase response time that is going to be far slower and slew induced distortions. The actual colorburst of 3.579545 MHZ is the center frequency and it has an overall bandwidth of about 1MHz so knocking this down in the hetrodyne process is going to shrink this as well.

Thanks, I probably don't fully understand the intricacies of the system. I thought that doubling color subcarrier will afford twice more bandwidth for color resolution, which would not reach Betacam but would be markedly better than pitiful color resolution across all the color-under formats.

8mm has the highest color subcarrier frequency of them all, and it seems to have made a subtle but noticeable difference:

VHS: 629 kHz
Umatic and Beta: 688 kHz
8mm: 743 kHz

Originally Posted by ARC Tech-109

Betacam is its own animal and doesn't use any color carriers in the conventional sense, when everything comes together the color bandwidth is about 120 lines in the real world with far less phase error or jitter, I don't see how even an improved down conversion is going to compete but stranger things have happened. The pro broadcast side of Sony was a huge money maker for them and they always met the demands of the buying professionals knowing they had no problem with the pricetag, when a station or the network ratings are on the line money is no object. It must be rugged & reliable on the outside and as accurate as possible on the inside so I would think a "compromise" like a hetrodyne wouldn't be a consideration in the big picture. Just a few degrees of phase error could cause issues with a chroma key so while a TBC can help it won't filter or fix everything.

Yeah, I know that Betacam is different, but it is a fact that some smaller broadcasters used SVHS and Hi8 for daily reporting, and bigger networks used Hi8 footage from places like China and Iraq, ABC used VHS-C camcorders basically as crash cams for POV shots of bobsleigh runs in 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, so a consumer-grade format better than Hi8 would have been appreciated, don't you think?

Michael Rosenblum. a former CBS new s producer, regularly contributes to theMacSeil Lehrer NewsHow, Nighiline, and other new s programs on the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and British Broadcasting Corporation. He sees hi-8 as the prime acquisition format for the much touted "desktop video" revolution. "I simply couldn't afford Betacam." he says. "And until recently you couldn't get anything accepted on these show s unless it was Beta. My main pitch to clients is a high-quality news product for a fraction of the price. A year ago. nobody wanted to talk to me about hi-8. Now, they're breaking down my door trying to learn about this format. A lot of these network dinosaurs only know how to spend money. The problem is they 're spending themselves out of business. They realize they've got to do something fast, and low-cost video is the answer." - James McBride, 1992