What was DV used for in broadcast?
 

Hey Folks

For those in the know, what was DV used for in professional broadcast? Was is only just used for outside ENG (using DVCAM/DVCPRO), or was it ever used for playout of a full programme?

For the ENG side of things, would the footage have been played direct from the tape during a news broadcast, or would it have been transcoded/moved to another format?

My understanding is that higher-budget broadcasters would have used Betacam/Betacam Digital for playout, but I'm interested to hear of any DV playout stories that may exist.

Thanks

In my studio days, I would sometime get DV25 in MXF containers from certain broadcasters. This was most assuredly NOT the broadcast masters, or even duplicates (though everything was digital by the 2000s, no real need/use of tapes for broadcast playback), but instead a "shareable" file between studios. It was a stupid choice, because the DV lost color data, and it was extremely obvious. But that particular project was going to be lossy output anyway. But it still would have been less lossy had 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 been submitted. I mentioned this, was ignored at least once, and then was given DVC50 (4:2:2) the final few times.

The content here was documentary series (10-ep or less runs), most of which were not overly interesting. The popular series were licensed to bigger players (pre-Netflix), or kept in-house to the broadcaster.

Stuff has changed a lot in the past 10 years.

Interesting! Things sure have changed a lot!

I wonder if in PAL regions if the situation was any different, given that DV PAL is 4:2:0 colour.

Lordsmurf - in that experience you shared, what were you doing with the DV files? Were they played out over the air?

Cheers

I had some miniDV tapes and from the contents looks like small production studio used them for videoclips, Possibly shot with a prosumer miniDV camcorder like the FX1.

the wars in the Middle East really kick started the boom in MiniDV ENG back in 2003, or more technically correct perhaps, we should use SNG

https://www.poynter.org/archive/2003/from-eng-to-sng/

hundreds of news teams using Canon EX1 and EX2's, and Sony DCR-PC1000 MiniDV footage (where on the run video of any quality was more important than setting up cameras on tripods ) , the DCR-PC1000 was available to purchase in 2005, pretty amazing 3 CMOS ( psuedo CCD) camera for SNG work - and if it stopped working you just threw it away and used another !

not sure where your interest lies, but here are also some movies shot on DV - both PAL and NTSC, and some 24 fps movies shot using the Canon XL2

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls052301267/

I don't think that IMdb list is entirely accurate. But I know Jackass was filmed with a mix of cameras, but was psuedo-documentary/indy style. Doesn't really count. Most of those titles are budget indy flicks, and budget projects use whatever is budget at the time. Most of those are not broadcast, and are screened (usually at art houses, rarely wide releases).

It was mostly ENG (for others reading, ENG = electronic news gathering). It mostly started with 9/11, and the wars in the aftermath. But it had been going on as far back as the late 90s.

Which Canon DV camera took dSLR lenses? (XL2, others?) Those are the ones that were most popular in smaller studios, news crews, etc. You could mount some really nice glass on it, the red-rimmed EOS lenses like 70-200 f/2.8.

DV wasn't a bad shooting format whatsoever, it's the conversion use that is terribly lossy and destructive to the sources.

Because of its lossy compression DV wasn't used much-if at all for final broadcast. Even by the late 90s big-time brodcasters like the BBC and NBC here in America were already playing shows off servers, but almost everything would have been copied from tape. DigiBeta* and some other more obscure formats were used for mastering.

DV and its pro variants (DVCAM/DVCPro) were heavily used for ENG and editing in the late 90s and 2000s. Non-linear editing was still new. Heck, even editing without generation loss was still new when DV came around. From what I could find the TV station I work at switched from Betacam SP to DVCPRO for ENG sometime in 1997. A competing format for ENG was Sony's Betacam SX if you want to research that one.

Remember, too, that DV25 (and DV50/100) was not really a tape format, but a codec. Also, digital broadcast in the 'States was/is always MPEG-2 4:2:0. Before going tapeless in 2007 the TV station I work at played tapes within newscasts as well as recorded feeds for later broadcast or editing with Panasonic AJ-D850s. The output of the decks, though, was fed through the production switcher, and anything for air was copied and prepped to playout servers. News stories on tape were already edited. Tapes were frequently wiped with a bulk tape eraser (fancy magnet) so they could be reused.

*DigiBeta = Digital Betacam - another Betacam variant widely used for mastering and playout before stuff went HD and/or tapeless