Downconvert HDV & HD Upgrade

[Mark A. Foley]

If I get one of the new HDV format cameras and I downconvert HDV to SD in camera, do I need to get the HD upgrade to my FS-4?

[Kevin Shaw]

On the Sony cameras (e.g. FX1) you can record to HDV on tape while recording SD on your Firestore, if you have the camera set to output SD through the firewire port. I don't know if the same applies to other HDV cameras.

[Mark A. Foley]

Thanks Kevin...I'm getting the FX1. I'm curious about one thing, what is the difference (quality wise) of downcoverting to SD in camera as opposed to recording to HDV and downconverting to SD in your NLE for delivery to DVD?

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Mark A. Foley

...what is the difference (quality wise) of downcoverting to SD in camera as opposed to recording to HDV and downconverting to SD in your NLE for delivery to DVD?

There is some quality difference, but not nearly as much as compared to delivering full HD resolution. For now I've concluded that if someone isn't paying for HD quality, it's not worth the extra hassle to edit at HD resolution and I just downsample out of the camera. This still yields very nice widescreen DVDs.

[Mark A. Foley]

Kevin,
In your opinion, is the downsampled HDV FX1vfootage still better once burned to DVD than the equivalent 2100 or 170 footage?

[Pierre Barberis]

IMO the downconverting efficiency (quality-wise) to SD of a "Good" MPEG2 encoder (TMPG, Canopus Procoder) produces a VISIBLY (much) better qualitythan the downconvert of my camera(s) ( aFX1 and HC1).

An other solution you might be willing to consider is to encode in "quarter def" .

Let me elaborate on that: M2T ( and cineform AVI) definition is 1440*1080.
If you encode in 720 *540 you will have one half the pixels in each direction, therefore a Quarter Def pic.

You would be SURPRISED BY THE QUALITY , which probably comes from the fact that 1080i does not carry much more info vertically than what 540 can give.

if you want to play this output on a "less powerful" computer ( this is what i do when travelling with a lightweight portable) do this with the Windows Media Video codec ( preferably with the help of TMPGEncExpress, even directly from the M2T files !) at a reasonable rate : my best pick is 1600-1800 Kbps depending upon the "activity" shown in the clip. it encodes pretty fast ( 6/7 the real time) probably due to the "easy divide" factor! Again, AMAZING RESULT given the VERY small size of the files !! (Do not forget to compress the audio, too..) GIVE IT A TRY !!

MPEG2 wise, you can encode it in PAL format albeit 30 fps to take advantage of the 576 capability... Most players seem to chunk that OK.

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Mark A. Foley

Kevin, In your opinion, is the downsampled HDV FX1vfootage still better once burned to DVD than the equivalent 2100 or 170 footage?

I don't have either of those cameras, but would say that HDV downsampled out of the camera to widescreen DV and then rendered to widescreen DVD will look better than anything you can do to get widescreen video from a typical 4x3 SD camera. There's a fundamental incompatibility between 4x3 SD and playback on modern widescreen HDTVs, so any camera without a true widescreen recording mode is effectively obsolete. In practice they'll continue to be useful for some time to come, but mainly because customers don't understand yet what they're missing by not getting proper widescreen footage.