Is AVCHD a true HD format?

[rc444]

Is AVCHD a true HD format?

Apparently I've heard it's going to replace HDV because it employs MPEG-4 technologies that have less niggles than the traditional artifacts that go with MPEG-2.

Or, is AVCHD going to just be a cheap way of rebranding HDV?

I know that several production companies don't accept HDV. But will AVDHD have any chance of achieving the same status of a true HD formats like XDCAM EX or DVCPRO HD?

 

[Huy Vu]

What's a "true" HD format? HD is by definition a standards of resolution, so any codec capable of achieving that resolution is an HD codec, regardless of implementation. That's why it's wrong to say that HDV is "fake" HD and the likes. There's better codec and there's worse codec, but there's no "fake" codec here.

AVCHD uses h.264 compression to compress video in a much more efficient way than HDV, but ultimately, it's still a highly compressed interframe implementation. To date no camera is capable of recording AVCHD at it's 24mb/sec maximum, and it remains to be seen whether the 13 mb/s implementation on the HMC150 will live up or surpass the standard of the current crop of HDV cameras.

 

[Barry_Green]

Or, is AVCHD going to just be a cheap way of rebranding HDV?

AVC-HD is similar in style to HDV. It's improved in most ways, since it offers full-raster recording, true 24p recording, uncompressed audio, and AVC compression instead of MPEG-2. But it's still a long-GOP, low-bandwidth, 4:2:0 system.

AVC-HD should be better than HDV across the board. We haven't yet seen a camera that's worthy of the format; all AVC-HD cameras have been little pocket-cams so far. Once we see something like the HMC150 we'll have a better idea of what it can do in the real world.

I know that several production companies don't accept HDV. But will AVDHD have any chance of achieving the same status of a true HD formats like XDCAM EX or DVCPRO HD?

Depends on the camera head. XDCAM-EX is a variant of HDV, it offers the same style of long-GOP MPEG-2 4:2:0 recording as HDV, but with a bigger pipe (35 megabits instead of 25) and uncompressed audio, and 1920x1080 full-raster recording. One could argue that AVC-HD and XDCAM-EX are comparable formats. At that point, it's all up to the camera head, not the recording format.