HDV vs DV filming if editing in Std DV?
by Alasdair Macdougall
on
Jun 6, 2009 at 4:56:21 pm
Can anyone tell me if it is better to film in HDV if you intend to edit in standard DV? No one in my filming club has the PC capacity to edit in HD, but we have been shooting in HDV on the basis that someone may go back to re-edit once PC capacity can cope (though unlikely). I've just been reading about the aggressive compression needed to squash HDV onto a miniDV tape & it seems logical that converting it back down to std DV for edit may be losing a lot of data compared to shooting in std DV in the 1st place. Any opinions or research on this?
Re: HDV vs DV filming if editing in Std DV? by Jerry Alto on Jun 7, 2009 at 2:44:01 am
Alasdair- We do this all the time... that way our field masters are high definition for future use. Most HDV cameras have a internal hardware down-convert DV option through the firewire out. In my experience the down-converted DV is equal to or better than tape shot in DV. Your comment, "the aggressive compression needed to squash HDV onto a miniDV tape" doesn't make a lot of sense. HDV is shot on the same tape as DV.
You say "edit in HD"..... did you mean edit in HDV native? Many PC systems can edit and play HDV just fine using Adobe Premier or Sony Vegas.
Re: HDV vs DV filming if editing in Std DV? by Tim Kolb on Jun 7, 2009 at 2:44:46 am
You are right.
HDV is aggressively compressed...but converting it to a standard-def aggressively compressed format isn't an image-quality preserving workflow.
HDV does take more computer torque to edit than DV, even though it's the same data rate...a consequence of the temporal (frame-interdependent) compression in the MPEG2 codec that is the basis of HDV.
Premiere Pro will handle HDV without transcoding...if your edit system is not strong enough to run HDV, I'd check into a CineForm-based workflow where you convert the HDV to an HD codec that will not sacrifice quality, but is very resource-efficient and runs on surprisingly modest workstations.
Re: HDV vs DV filming if editing in Std DV? by Alasdair Macdougall on Jun 7, 2009 at 4:37:26 pm
I'm not sure what you are advising here. Our group does have one copy of Premier Pro, so we could try out your HDV to HD codec, but most of us have editing software like Pinnacle Studio or Adobe Elements, which don't support HD at all, so the question is do you get better quality when editing in DV from raw footage shot in HDV or DV?
Re: HDV vs DV filming if editing in Std DV? by Brian Louis on Jun 8, 2009 at 1:06:54 am
Downconverted in camcorder, HDV to DV tends to appear better than footage shot as DV
The intermediate codec Tim is refering to is at the link below, this is the low end version
http://www.cineform.com/neoscene/features.php
