[ARC Tech-109]

Did someone say PIZZA?

Okay so seriously those USB dongles are at best for consumer use only and tempermental on a good day. What I suspect is happening is the burst level of the betamax is just below the threshold of the dongle DSP while your Hi8 has enough to lock on, you could grab the service manual for the betamax and find the burst level pot and push it up slightly or go with a more professional solution that being A. a timebase corrector or B a professional level capture device that is Linux compatible. On my end I run a number of TBC's as each seems to have a different "personality" with respect to the playback machine. For capture I use a Newtek Tricaster broadcast TC550 which does realtime capture but runs under embedded XP, I also have a Blackmagic PCIe SDI capture device for grabbing raw SDI right out of the digibeta deck. This captures everything raw right to disk, what I do is use the digibeta to transcode the analog input be it Y R-Y B-Y or composite plus audio to SDI or right off the betacam tape to fill a 2TB drive then slip that into my Linux box and edit/convert using Kdenlive. Even with a gigabit ethernet the transfers are painfully slow. The added advantage is the digibeta has proc amp level controls and doesn't need to genlock to the analog source however it is helpful. I realize this is a long trip around the park but it's so far been the best lossless solution that's affordable and compatible with the older 4:3 video without playing aspect ratio games.

I've seen a number of those Tricaster boxes on ePay over the years that are missing the drives, problem is Newtek has long since discontinued any and all support for the "legacy" systems after they were bought up but I do have a working image I can copy over and as long as the box itself has the serial numbers and the Tricaster reg number it can be done and I can do it. Newtek had the good sense to include a linux based rebuilder image on the system drive that can be copied over using Ghost then the new drive rebuilt in the computer itself, it will capture the hidden reg number of the Tricaster board during this rebuild and match against the numbers you provide... provided they're on the Tricaster box itself. Time consuming yes but it seems to be the ONLY way to ressurect the TC550 without the factory master image CDROM and I've successfully done many this way. I don't know if the TC550 image will work with the TC350LIVE! or studio models.