First, sorry if this is in the wrong place. I figured it'd be best discussed here because this is where the DVX-100A discussion has been, and this is only relevant for the DVX-100A.
Squeeze mode may in fact offer anamorphic images of nearly identical quality to that of the anamorphic adapter. It is still a hit, but a slight one, resulting in an image utilizing 97% of the nessesary pixels instead of 84%. It all comes down to how the DVX-100A handles image processing, which is anyone's guess. To explain:
A minidv image is comprised of 345600 pixels, arranged 720 x 480. The DVX-100 (both models) takes an image with 410000 pixels (roughly 739.36 x 554.52) and downsamples the image to 345600. The 16x9 area of the DVX chips utilize all 739.36 horizontal pixels, but only 467.8 of the vertical pixels. With the matted 16x9, this figure didn't much matter... the 467.8 pixels were added to the dead pixels of the initial 554.52 on the chip so that the resulting image wouldn't be skewed: the image needed to be 4:3, so the image area was only 405 pixels tall, the other 75 pixels being dedicated to matting. But if the squeeze mode downsamples to 720x480 by only scanning the center of the chip, ignoring the unused pixels out of the 16x9 area altogether, then it can make its downsample using 467.8 pixels to generate a 480 pixel tall image. Not quite perfect, but certainly better than the previous post-stretching technique which created its vertical resolution based on 405 pixels.
Maybe I'm crazy, and I'm certainly no engineer, but is this possible? I just realized that the DVX-100 chips oversample and downconvert to 720x480, so I figured it may in fact be the case that the anamorphic area used in squeeze mode has nearly 480 vertical pixels to use. It doesn't quite, but it is frighteningly close.
Of course, squeeze mode may just be doing the same thing we do in post-stretching, and it may downsample the whole chip's image to 720x480 before stretching. Anyone know how we can determine this when the camera is released?
Will
Squeeze mode may in fact offer anamorphic images of nearly identical quality to that of the anamorphic adapter. It is still a hit, but a slight one, resulting in an image utilizing 97% of the nessesary pixels instead of 84%. It all comes down to how the DVX-100A handles image processing, which is anyone's guess. To explain:
A minidv image is comprised of 345600 pixels, arranged 720 x 480. The DVX-100 (both models) takes an image with 410000 pixels (roughly 739.36 x 554.52) and downsamples the image to 345600. The 16x9 area of the DVX chips utilize all 739.36 horizontal pixels, but only 467.8 of the vertical pixels. With the matted 16x9, this figure didn't much matter... the 467.8 pixels were added to the dead pixels of the initial 554.52 on the chip so that the resulting image wouldn't be skewed: the image needed to be 4:3, so the image area was only 405 pixels tall, the other 75 pixels being dedicated to matting. But if the squeeze mode downsamples to 720x480 by only scanning the center of the chip, ignoring the unused pixels out of the 16x9 area altogether, then it can make its downsample using 467.8 pixels to generate a 480 pixel tall image. Not quite perfect, but certainly better than the previous post-stretching technique which created its vertical resolution based on 405 pixels.
Maybe I'm crazy, and I'm certainly no engineer, but is this possible? I just realized that the DVX-100 chips oversample and downconvert to 720x480, so I figured it may in fact be the case that the anamorphic area used in squeeze mode has nearly 480 vertical pixels to use. It doesn't quite, but it is frighteningly close.
Of course, squeeze mode may just be doing the same thing we do in post-stretching, and it may downsample the whole chip's image to 720x480 before stretching. Anyone know how we can determine this when the camera is released?
Will
