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I'm going to break this up so you can easily quote me, you do have a talent for this.
DigiBeta was and still is a very good format for artistic creation and that video proves this. It upscales well and retains that "edge" without looking "crusty". I worked with the DVW-970WS which is a dual aspect ratio camera with a mad DSP that can do most anything but wash your socks. I did some creative promos doing fast cuts at odd angles and they turned out great but the marketing people said they were too "urban" (whatever that was) and distracting and nixed them in favor of some stupid talking head over a powerpoint presentation... I'm not sure I can post them on Youtube being they were company property, too many lawyers with no sense of humor.
That Panasonic conceptual workstation would have been a welcome addition over what I was working with at the time, a long length desktop with monitors, decks and other support equipment all stacked and arranged haphazard as they wouldn't spring for proper racks and switchers so everything was kept "accessible" for cable swapping. I'm working for a worldwide communications company with billions in annual profits and the green light to spend half a million on A/V yet they want everything on a desktop?! okay enough of my btichin'
The hear & now. At the moment I do have some DVCAM and DVCPRO in my mix along with Digi & Analog Betacam plus the giant Type-C formats in what is my living room... I give studio apartment a literal meaning. Everything in my racks is from the broadcast professional arena and I live in a balanced 600 ohm world of XLR connectors. The main monitor is a Samsung PN64F8500 Plasma from 2014 and everything else is Sony CRT based BVM monitors. DVCPRO is Panasonic AJ-SD755 and DVCPRO-HD is Panasonic AJ-HD150 editors while my Betacam is a Sony DVW-A500/1 with the BKDW505 composite interface and BKDW515 operator panel. Everything SDI is switched by a Newtek TC550 Tricaster using the SDI inputs and this is output to a Blackmagic SDI to HDMI microconverter. No I'm not the most up-to-date on the cutting edge of the 4K world but frankly I really don't care for 4K to begin with as most everyone seems to make things look so harsh & edgy at this level. What I can give you is an honest opinion on the highs & lows of the DVCAM and DVCPRO, again they're opinions of my own educated and experienced observations looking at them thru various display mediums and they also include a Panasonic TAU series 34" widescreen monitor using the HDMI input along with the Y R-Y B-Y inputs.
At first glance both the Sony and Panasonic DV formats look exactly the same because in reality they are, Sony uses a wider track and faster tape speed but the digital formats share the same roots. On the Plasma they look sharp but somewhat fake with the dithering caused by the 8-bit grayscale, the CRT based looks slightly better and stepping down to the analog inputs makes no difference here. My source for this is a Sony DXC-D55WS docked to a DSR-1 and my scenery was the 2021 Vasaloppet ski event our town hosts. Plenty of colors against a murky snow covered ground on a bright sunny day. The announcer has no idea what he's talking about.
DVCPRO-HD on the other hand has a very clean detail to the picture but again despite this the dithering is still apparent and somewhat annoying. Unfortunately I have to suffer using the downconverted SDI output for this so it's not very objective. My source material comes from a railfan friend who shoots train videos using a Panasonic AJ-HDX900 package. Compared to the standard DVCPRO this is somewhat better in that one can see the blades of grass in the background rather than a green blanket of various shades.
Digital Betacam... my favorite but I will do my best to be objective here. Yes it's SD and right on the edge of the widescreen transition but unlike DVCPRO and its variants it doesn't have the gradients or highlight crushing and it upscales to 1080p mpg4 quite well. My source material is several file drawers of DigiBeta cassettes I've accumulated over my professional career from various post production houses and broadcast friends I've made over the past 35 years I've been doing this. Pound for pound the prime copy of the Austin City Limits presentation "LCD Soundsystem" is about the best DigiBeta tape I have. Real 4-channel audio from the board (not surround mix) that really puts my audio system to the test (2x QSC ISA-300Ti amps) and the video really looks lifelike despite being 2-dimensional. No gradiations in the lighting, background or subjects it really kicks... the posterior. Okay so I'm being politically correct, this is a family-friendly venue after all. I consider this tape to be my benchmark and have tried to insure it. My speakers are a combination of Vega D9's (earthquake on demand) and reworked KLH Model-7s that routinely get the full output of the QSC amps which run on 240V.
My less popular and known DigiBeta subjects are super boring overpaid idiots corporate somehow mislabeled "talent" talking about new products, boredroom meetings (spelling says it all) and various interviews done on site and in the moment. Comparing these with some of the accumulated DVCAM tapes received from others the DigiBeta still looks far better regardless of how ugly some of these suits are. I'm retired now so I can say this with immunity but the lawyers won't let me divulge the company names or trademarks, I will keep the peace... for now.
One thing the DigiBeta deck does well is cross convert analog BetaSP to digital including the AFM audio. I won't get into the specifics here but I will say the analog tapes look really good overall. My source material is three file cabinet drawers of interviews and raw takes I did as a camera for hire for a very well known drug & alcohol rehab that spans 20-some years. I still have my first 3/4 U-Matics. I will say the digital converted BetaSP tapes look the most "lifelike" in terms of color and quality. A word that best describes this is photographic in the sense of an old school print from a 35MM film.
Now I know this thread is about the DVCPRO & DVCAM formats and if they had a parallel with computer storage backup, the reality is they're nothing more than a proprietary digital storage medium that was used for digital audio & video recording. A container really that could have been used as a data backup medium but never was, maybe there wasn't a need for this or the parent corporations didn't want a crossover. There were a number of storage backup formats already in play at the time so it's hard for me to speculate as to why the larger formats were never used. The technology was already there and proven in the case of the Data-8 used by Exabyte and 4MM DDS, these did evolve and expand in capacity over the years with the various compression algorithms. In reality it's so hard to speculate but it sure is fun.
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