The HD to SD TV factor

Geno

Geno

Active member
Much has been made of the fact that there is no way to distribute HD because nobody has HD sets or HD-DVD players anyways but am I wrong in my assumption that alot of what we watch on SDTV nowadays originated and was shot in some format of HD. Given the compression pipeline the cable and satellite companies must be throwing away a huge % of the source material and it still looks good. I haven't actually seen what true HD looks like on an HD set but it would probably shatter my brains molecules. So if I take a DVX or other comparable SD camera, shoot edit and make a dvd, then take this new HVX at 1080/24p, shoot, edit, then downrez to SD on DVD, the HVX footage would still blow away the DVX at SD right? I know not nearly as much as when displayed in all it's glory on a good Hi Def Plasma from an HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. So one would conclude that having HD is still a major advantage even in an SD world, and for image quality junkies like cinematographer/shooters like those that frequent this board who will sell their spleen if they could get 10 more lines of resolution for it, doesn't the HVX give a major advantage immediatly or is the downrez factor a minimal concern?
 
It remains to be seen whether downrezzed HD will look superior to comparable equipment imaging a native SD signal.

The HVX will give us another option to test in those regards. I think the HVX will provide by far the best-looking DVDs of any under-$10,000 camera, but not because of HD, rather because of its DVCPRO50 format, which is standard-def with minimal compression and twice the color sampling of DV. That's where the big benefit is going to come in, for standard-def DVD producers.

But, again, it all depends on the footage. Specs and paper statistics will prove meaningless if the footage doesn't look good.
 
Barry_Green said:
But, again, it all depends on the footage. Specs and paper statistics will prove meaningless if the footage doesn't look good.
Click to expand...

Agreed! But talking about new gear is so much fun. :D
 
My experience has been that shooting HD for an SD delivery is a waste of data and does not necessarily get you a better image. For instance I shot a TV Show for MTV networks on the Varicam because they wanted to protect for any future HD brodcasts. During the same trip we also shot another show using the SDX-900 and some DVXs. When I saw the down rezed footage I was surprised to find the SDX-900 footage looked crisper. Now this was a straight downconvert just for cutting, so the final online may change my mind. Still though, in my opinion unless you know you have an HD future for your project, shoot it in SD. At the very least you get more recording timme and save drive space.
My 2¢,
 
evinsky said:
When I saw the down rezed footage I was surprised to find the SDX-900 footage looked crisper.
Click to expand...
That's pretty much what I would guess as well. 2/3" chips against 2/3" chips, same lens vs. same lens, I would expect that native imaging on the SDX would produce a better SD image than a downrezzed-to-SD image from a VariCam.

Someday I'll have to get ahold of both cameras at the same time to verify, but it just makes sense.
 
Would someone mind explaining that to my not so technical mind? I would have thought that if you started off with a higher resolution image (HD) and downrezzed it, it would be a much better result than starting off with an SD image. What am I missing here?
 
Putting two square pegs into two square holes works easily.

Fitting three square pegs into those two square holes involves compromises.
 
There is another advantaged to shooting in HD and then crop it to SD and that is the extra image space you'll have to play with if something isn't in frame the way you want, or if you want to do some really interesting editing like they did on this Blink 182 music video (I can't think of the name), but they used the extra space and moved the image around.
 
I'm sure we're all gonna blow quite a few gigabytes fooling around with this new camera. However my suspicion is that for those of us who will be using it to make a living the decision to shoot HD and in which format to do so, will be based on the needs of the project. SD is alive and well. Especially good 4:2:2 SD. So I think there's no need to shoot HD just because you can.
 
Thanks for the "Three square pegs in two square holes" response. That gives me something almost tangible to understand it by. So all of the great looking programming that I have seen lately, shows like "Survivor" and "American Idol" through my old $400 25 Sharp, it isn't the "HD" that's doing it as much as the 2/3 inch chips I guess plus all the other unhearalded advances in the pipeline before it reaches me.
 
Well, Survivor isn't shot in HD, although American Idol is. If you want to see the difference between HD and SD programming, watch the Tonight Show, then swap over to Late Night with David Letterman. That's an example of downconverted HD vs. SD origination.

Downconverted HD can look great. No question about that. The question is whether it looks better... and I think that there are reasons why it wouldn't.
 
Lest we forget, the HVX will have the 4:2:2 color space whereas the DVX doesn't. And even though it's not a 2/3rd chip unit, it's still (on paper) stronger imagery than DVX footage for roughly double the price of a DVX. I mean the SDX900 will likely have better image quality and better lenses, but it's 25 grand, right? I think the HVX will be a great in-between cam and more with the variable frame rate capabilities (especially for the price).
 
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