Hi folks, only had the camera now for 2 days and already in love!

Just a quick Q though. My workflow is basically for outputing to the web and possibly making DVDs at present - plus my systems wont accept HDV at all for some reason so my questions is - should I be shooting everything from now on in HDV and letting the camera down convert to DV before landing at my PC or should I just use regular DV for everything in the mean time.

Will recording in DV mean a better result on the PC (I'd read somewhere about 4:2:2 or something that was better in DV mode than HDV as the storage data rate is the same but the compression is harder on the data when using HDV).

Many thanks,

Rikki

I would shoot everything HDV, you can always downconvert to SD. But if you shoot SD, you won't be able to upconvert to HD later on when you upgrade your system. Just my 2 cents.

Rikki - on Windows, you need XP SP2 to get the HDV video driver for your camera. Then of course you need video editing software that can do HDV. (Not sure what you need with a Mac for HDV capture.)

I shoot everything as HDV. I tested shooting in HDV and then 1) set the camera to output in DV (DV lock) (camera is downconverting) to capture DV and 2) capture HDV and downconvert in the computer. I'm editing with Vegas 7e. The SD DVD's I got by capturing HDV and downconverting in the computer looked better than the DVD's I got by setting the camera to DV lock and capturing it as DV. But the render times are (much) longer to downconvert in the computer.

I haven't tried shooting DV with my HV20. That might look better than HDV downconverted in the camera.

Other folks will surely know more about this than I, but DV colorspace is 4:1:1 - HDV is 4:2:0. Neither is really ideal compared to 4:2:2 (or 4:4:4) but neither are they anything for most of us to worry about. Of course the compression is greater on HDV since it's 2 1/2 times the resolution, but the codecs have come far enough that again, most of us don't have to worry about that.

Peter, just got a HV20 and have Panasonic AY-DVM83MQ (dry lube) tapes. What brand/type of tapes are you shooting HDV on? Thx.

I haven't tried shooting DV with my HV20. That might look better than HDV downconverted in the camera.
I remember seen a comparision in this forum, and the difference was huge. HDV downconverted to DV looked far better in color, sharpness and everything than original DV with the same camera (Canon HV20 of course).

i find the best way is to capture/edit in HDV or an intermediate codec, and then output straight to SD mpeg for the dvd, bypassing dv entirely, if you compare uncompressed sd to dv there is a considerable difference, and it translates into the mpeg encoding as well...

http://file.meyersproduction.com/hv20/Downrez%20comparison.png

as you can see they are both SD, but the uncompressed is much crisper