Re: HD & DVCAM

No examples that I have placed for the public. For the key testing, I captured 10bit uncompressed HD-SDI from a Panny studio deck and from the F70 XDCAM HD deck.
I also did a capture HD-SDI uncompressed right off the XDCAM camera (never going to MPEG2) and compared that to the same shot recorded to MPEG2 and then captured HD-SDI uncompressed.
For key testing, I used Primatte and Keylight as well as Boris Continuum. And I also used Matrox Axio (which produced the cleanest key of all with a bonus of being real-time). The key from MPEG2 was just as clean to our naked eyes as the pure uncompressed original. I had more trouble keying the Varicam footage.

The biggest drawback for us of the XDCAM is that it cannot do 720P. It is 1080 only for HD. (24P, 25P, 30P and 50i, 60i). But we have found that 1080P footage downconverts nicely to 720P. And -- with the money you save on Varicam or F900, you can buy hardware downconverters that do a good job at 1080i to 720P. :-) We do the downconvert in software for now. I looked at several converters at NAB in the event we get a client that needs a lot of 720P.

td