Video Products of San Diego (VPSD), a production and post production facility in San Diego, California, recently selected JVC's DIGITAL-S as its house editing format.

Specializing in production and post-production of full-length feature programs, commercials and industrial video, the company recently put DIGITAL-S through its paces editing 52 half-hour "Extreme Sports" segments for FOX Sports Channel International.

Owner Dave Richards was most impressed with the pre-read capabilities of the BR-D85. "It changes the whole complexion of what you do," said Richards. "Not only can you do A/B roll editing with only two VTRs, but you can always be on match frame. And the BR-D85 is the only machine with pre-read that is affordable."

"DIGITAL-S is a real work horse format, and the quality is excellent." Richards said. "DIGITAL-S allows our creativity to blossom because we can do complex transition over the top of what's been shot," he noted.

"Thanks to DIGITAL-S, the color rendition is gorgeous and very quiet," he said. "Chroma isn't distorted, even when it's dubbed down to S-VHS." In addition, Richard says the picture quality is better when he edits on DIGITAL-S and transfers it to Betacam SP than when he edits straight to Betacam.

VPSD was in search of a very solid format. They were having difficulty with Beta SP because of the number of drop outs they were experiencing, and DIGITAL-S solved this problem. "DIGITAL-S is a glitch free format media-wise," Richards noted.

VPSD investigated other digital formats before purchasing the DIGITAL-S BR-D85 editing recorder, but found that "DIGITAL-S just looks better than the DV formats." Since DIGITAL-S has 4:2:2 digital processing and very mild compression, it doesn't have the artifacts associated with digital.

Another benefit of DIGITAL-S is that it allows VPSD to spool or archive non-linear digital on-line programming and save it as digital representation.