1. Hit the power button on the power supply under the table
2. Boot up the Mac
3. Turn on the G RAID external drive. (It's the bigger grey drive to the left of the Mac.)

Follow booting up steps above

1. Open the AJA control panel on the dock
2. Select the Input Select tab on the left. Under Input Select select the appropriate source of video (VHS, 3/4“ are SDI 2 Beta is SDI1). The SDI can remain YUV.
3. Open the AJA Control Room on the dock.
4. Insert your tape in the appropriate machine and hit play
5. Adjust the sound levels on the Sescom audio converter. If you want to try and adjust the video, make adjustments on the Time Base Corrector (the thing with the flashing lights), otherwise you can just leave it on automatic.
6. In AJA Control Room, open Preferences and select the location you would like to save your clips (AKA the “capture path”). Recommended practice is to save to G-RAID external drive folder “AJA Capture” as a holding location before you make access versions and move them to appropriate final location.
7. Select the Capture tab in Control Room and click on File Type to select the file format. For an archival master Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ) is the best of these options.
8. Name your file in the File Name field.
9. Press the red square record button located in the far right side of the screen, then hit play on your source deck to begin capturing.
10. Hit the red record button again to stop capture. The file will be saved wherever you indicated in step 6.
11. You can use Adobe Media Encoder to make a lower-res access copy. We use the h.264 mp4 encoding but there are TONS of options.

You can also use Adobe Premiere to capture footage. The instructions are below in the PAL section.

Repeat booting up options from above.

Part 1: Preparing Playback
1. Turn on the Beta deck
2. Change the “line system” from 525(NTSC) to PAL(625) by following these instructions:

• Hit Shift & Menu to pull up the menu options
• Use the Jog/Shuttle dial to navigate to item 013 on the menu
• Hold the Jog/Shuttle button and turn the dial to change the setting from OFF to ON.
• Press the Set/Menu button.
• Hold the Jog/Shuttle button again and turn the dial to change from 525 to 625.
• Press Set/Menu
• Turn the Power off momentarily, then turn it on again.
• Repeat to change back to NTSC.

Part 2: Digitizing
1. Open up Adobe Premiere
2. When the project dialog window opens up, create a New Project (you can delete this later)
3. Select File—>Capture which opens the Capture panel.
4. You can control playback of the Beta deck from the capture window.
5. Check the various settings in the control pane before you begin.
6. You can digitize using one of several methods: “Logging” clips with In and Out points, where you log select “scenes” from your tape, Capture Tape, or Record.

• To Log and Capture, use the controls to navigate through the tape in hit the i and o keys to select In and Out points for your clips, then hit the Log Clip button. The in and out points will be saved in a list. You can log several clips throughout the tape, then Capture all of them by clicking the Log Clips button.
  
• To just Capture, move the tape to the about 5 seconds before where you would like it to start, hit Capture and the entire tape will be captured until you hit stop.
  
• To Record on the fly, play the tape and hit the red Record button control when you are ready to record part of the tape.
  
• There is also a “Scene Detect” button which will log separate clips whenever there is a break in the tape Time/Date stamp and automatically captures a “Master Clip” with sub-clips at each scene break.
  

Part 3: Reformatting
1. Once your clips have been captured, you will have to reformat them to NTSC to be playable. If you have multiple clips you can “queue” your clips to send them to Adobe Media Encoder, the stand alone encoding program, if not you can just encode your clip this way…
2. Select your clip in the Project panel, Source Monitor or bin.
3. Select File—>Export—>Media.
4. Select the file format you want for your file. Adobe sez “Select the preset best suited for your target means of playback”. In our case we would create an “Archive Original” and an “Access” copy so that means exporting twice. This could be easier if you sent them both to Queue.

“We digitize dozens of formats of video, film, and audio in our studio and have a few suggestions:

1. DPX is fine, but vary large and not very accessible. Unless you're planning on frame-by-frame restoration I might suggest something smaller like an MXF file with ProRes 444 encoding. 2. For access I'd also suggest an MP4 file with high-quality H.264 encoding. 3. Make sure the film is cleaned before digitization. 4. You can request a 4k capture, but I think it's overkill and beyond the point of diminishing returns. A 4k capture of Standard/Regular 8 film yields about 22,000 PPI, which is way beyond what is on that film. We offer 2k+ which still captures a high-definition frame-by-frame digital file. 5. The biggest practical decision might be about aspect ratio and crop. For example, are you okay with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is the aspect ratio of the film or do you want a 16:9 file with letterboxing (black bars on sides)? And do you want to capture just the image area of the film, or are you interested in the entire width go the film including film markings and sprocket holes? 6. If you get a good frame-by-frame capture you shouldn't need any stabilization. 7. After the film is digitized you can review the footage and decide if it needs any colorization. You can always keep the original capture and create an alternate file that is more faithful to the original. Some films will suffer from fading that render the image very magenta or red but can be recovered digitally with color correction software.”