Not liking the idea of HDV...

N

natob2

Well-known member
Is just me or does HDV sound like a bad idea? I feel like DV is already compressed enough, HDV just seems like it would be unacceptable. I was reading today that when you do quick camera moves with HDV there is artifacting!

I think it would be smart on Panasonic's part to skip HDV and focus on DVCPROHD...or something similar. Mini-DV tape is old technology and needs to go. I'm not real up on all the video gossip but do you think Panny will go the solid-state card route in future DVX100-type cameras?
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

id say their intentions to implement their solid state P2 technology in some the new coming models are pretty sincere.as  its certainly the way of the future eventually. i hope its in the new DVX line, and i just cross my fingers that its in addition to a  DVCPRO-HD tape mech, and not just a complete replacement of a tape mech. cause those cards are a little too small storage wise right now, and a little too pricey.

IMHO, i think HDV would be at least more of a reliable pro format if the camera didnt try to compress the data so much in realtime but instead had a large enough buffer to store intermediate frames in so that the mpg compressor could take more time and use more surrounding frames to estimate motion better and avoid dropouts. as it is its imagery is great, but theres too many areas that somthing could go wrong in.. and working with it in post.. it isnt really the most optimal format to be going through multiple compressions or be high end compositing with at all. my feet are staying on the DVX ship till i can afford a real pro HD format camera that doesnt sacrifice solid consturction of the image just to get HD on the cheap. i want an HD image that has the solid framework behind it to allow me to work with it ruggedly and assuredly, and not have it fall apart at some point.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

Then there's the whole dropout problem with HDV. If you have a dropout, you lose 15 frames. Completely unacceptable.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

HDV is pure marketing on Sony's behalf, and a con in regards to making people thinking they're getting high quality HD, when instead they're getting good looking stuff that unfortunately is too compressed for anything but the internet.

Audio and compression are two major problems... then there's the 24p issue, and the HDV camera's phony answer to 24...

I'm waiting for solid state, but in the meantime, the DV on the DVX-100 and SDX-900 and the HD on the AJ-HDC27F are outstanding.

My 2 cents...

-R
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

HDV pure Sony Marketing???

The company that brought us the MemoryStick? The MiniDisk? Hi8?

Nah, I don't buy it. Sony doesn't hype substandard propriatary technologies as essential lifestyle items...it's just not what they do.

:P
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

Natob, funny you should mention a DVCPRO HD camera. I just read an article in the Millimeter magazine I subscribe to that mentioned something about this camera that will hit the market next month.

I copied and pasted the article below.

Panasonic has introduced the AJ-HDX400, a top production, 1080i DVCPRO HD camcorder that makes high definition acquisition more affordable for content creators. The AJ-HDX400 is available in February at a suggested list price of $42,500.

To dramatically lower the cost of HD postproduction, the AJ-HDX400 teams with the Panasonic AJ-HD1200A IEEE 1394 DVCPRO HD VTR and Apple Final Cut HD software to offer a powerful, affordable acquisition-through-editing system
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

Yes, the HDX400 is one step along the path, but it's not the only step they're taking. As has been repeated here many times, Panasonic has announced their intention to produce a DVCPRO-HD camera "priced competitive to the Sony HDV camera". Panasonic appears poised to do just as natob2 said, to skip HDV and go straight to the big gun.

However, I do suspect that if HDV were to catch on with consumers and everyone was offering HDV cameras, I'd guess that Panasonic would join the coalition and offer them as well. But for prosumer/pro use, it looks like they're hitching their wagon to DVCPRO-HD.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

HDV has potential.

First of all, if they moved from 60i to 24p (very likely someone will) then you're going to decrease the amount of frames that need to be encoded from 30fps to 24fps. That's a 20% decrease in the amount of information that needs to be encoded. That alone may be enough to limit artifacting. Who knows.

Secondly, you can increase the data rate from 25mbps to 50mbps. That doubles the amount of disk space you've got to play with and decreases the amount of compression that's required by half.

So, just doing those 2 things could significantly improve HDV performance. As far as the 1/2 second delay, there's some things you just have to live with. It's not like film doesn't screw up sometimes.

Naturally I hope Panasonic skips HDV and releases something superior like their DVCPRO-HD line. We'll see over the next couple of years. HD is going to be everywhere and someone's going to make a killer movie with it.

Did anyone ever make a killer movie with DV? I know there were quite a few good ones, but I never bought a single one for my DVD collection. I think that I hate the most about indie productions are the low production values and the bad acting. And those things are not going to be solved with a cheap HD camera no matter what.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

In my unresearched opinion, I think HDV is going to go the way of 3DO. Anyone remember 3do?

It's a cool idea, but it seems rushed to fill a market that doesn't exist yet. Maybe I'm the exception on this forum, but I don't have an HDTV. No one I know has one either, and only a few people i know are interested in buying one soon.

Obviously HDTV is the fact of the future (until layered LCD 3D), but in the meantime there's plenty of opportunity to R&D better HD solutions that don't cram an HD signal into a miniDV cassette through MPEG.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

An HD ready consumer market is at least 10 to 15 years away...imho.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

[quote author=Hayden_Rivers link=board=Events;num=1106771274;start=0#7 date=01/27/05 at 03:00:02]HDV has potential.
First of all, if they moved from 60i to 24p (very likely someone will) ...
Secondly, you can increase the data rate from 25mbps to 50mbps.[/quote]
But... if you did either of these things, it would no longer be HDV. It would be something else, but not HDV.

HDV has no provision for 24p. If they add 24p the same way that Panasonic added 24p to DV, you could get the 24p look, but you would *not* get the increased compression efficiency you speculate on, because it would have to be encoded as 24p within a 60i (or 60p or 30p) data stream, so there will still be just as many frames, and stressing the compression just as much.

Second, if they move to 50mbps, they just totally leave the realm of HDV. They could create a new format, called "HDV-50" or something, just like Panasonic did with DVCPRO-50, but it would not be an hdV format and it wouldn't play in any existing HDV equipment.

So HDV as itself cannot become the things you mention. There could be a new HDV2 format developed some day that does the things you suggest, but it would be exactly that -- a NEW format. And incompatible with existing HDV equipment (maybe backward compatible for playing old HDV footage, but existing HDV cameras and decks could not work with the new 50mbps/24p footage being speculated on).
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

I have a real distaste for the HDV format--I don't think it offers much to indie filmmakers. It seems more like a pure Sony consumer format, gimmicky and hobbled from the start. You have to give Sony some credit though, someone has to dive in first. The worst thing that could happen, would be for a technical dead-end like HDV to catch on and sway future camera development at our price point. HDV is ingeneous and they've managed to do an amazing job of compression, but the core fact is that it's designed around a 25 Mb/s tape capture system. Tape is breathing it's death rattle, so it doesn't make sense as anything else other than a brief transitional format. The compression is efficient, but brutal and how can you even talk about 24 p when there aren't even frames in the conventional sense (because of the inter-frame compression scheme). As processor power and storage becomes faster and cheaper, I'm looking for higher resolution, more color data/space and a compression scheme that's post-production friendly. I think we'll get it in the next 2-3 years and it won't be HDV.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

it's nice to see how a not long ago advanced technology is becoming a sweet old-school thing... the grain, the noise, the texture, SD rules! ;)
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

I'm just still surprised at how no one seems to be designing any kind of direct disk addressing. There are several pocket hard-disk based portable media players out there that read, write and file manage drives in excess of 20 gigs...all encoded and self-contained. How hard could it possibly be to build a simple disk utility and connect a firewire drive to a camera for direct disk recording and file management?
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

..there are several direct to disk DV recording solutions available . it certainly would be nice to have it integrated with newer cameras for different formats, yet easily user removable for swapping it out with other drives or devices.
 
Re: Not liking the idea of HDV...

The camera already has the hard part done, it converts a video signal into a digital stream of bits and spits it out a firewire port. All you need is a small microprocessor to keep track of the file strucutre and manage the disk.

You could have a camera that looks exactly like any other camera, but have the firewire port be switchable for DV out or Data out and just plug in whatever external firewire drive you like.
 
JVC's HD-100 has me very curious, especially since the audio features should be better than the Sony, and it does indeed do 24 frames progressive. That along with the use of some ENG lenses makes it oddly more interesting than Sony's HDV line. I still think DVCPRO HD is the format of choice for Hi-Def and the HDX-400 should definitely be the right step forward. Either way, it's always exciting to have new formats introduced, but in all reality bringing HD down to a small little miniDV tape seems somewhat faddish, only because the tape itself is not really designed to handle that much bandwith... Anyhow, I'm happy to see all this stuff coming out... the Beta period will pretty much be the next 6 months... So, some cool projects will hopefully display what all these cameras can do... and soon!

Best,

Ramzi
 
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