HDV NO MORE
As much as I may have written about the HDV medium in the past and heralded its arrival, I have come to realize that it serves no purpose in what I do. I have been excited about the Sony 3 CCD camera and other tools to make it all work for some time, but in the end, I have no need for any of it.
While it is certainly my intention to do a feature in high definition, none of the currently available HDV tools meet the standard I have chosen. The Sony camera clearly cannot have square pixels since it uses the resolution of 1440x1080. They claim it is natively 16:9, but that has to be anamorphically stretched. True HD is not anamorphic.
The greatest lack in all the HDV toolset is that none of the current crop of tools is 24P. They are all 30 or 60 fps and the Sony pipeline is interlaced! Who wants to make a film like that?! Finally there comes the hard hitting blow that HDV uses an MPEG-2 transport stream. It is not immediately editable or accessible like DV. You see, I always though that HDV would bring the speed and flexibility of working with DV to the home user, only with high resolutions. To some degree it has, but it will never be the same, even if 24P solutions do come, which I expect will be very soon. The fact is, you will always have to find a format at which to do all your work and then finally create an MPEG 2 transport stream to export to your camera or deck. This does not help me at all.
The Vegas software I wrote about previously is the answer for me. You see, I want to work in true high definition, true square pixels and true 24P at every phase of the pipeline. All I really needed was a codec that made doing so as easy as working with DV on the timeline. I have found that. It doesn't involve HDV. The only advantage to having an HDV deck might be to convert to the format to view on a high def TV, but it's a converted form and not the original, so how helpful is that. Not more than creating a DV preview as gar as I am concerned.
Vegas also has one extra plus. They list the ability to create a 24P DVD as a main feature of their tool. Most people don't even know this is possible. I have known for a while as many Japanese DVD's have been 24P for some time. This can be used for generating previews as well. Either way, I will study HDV no more.
Comments?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home