Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Motion & Video => Topic started by: cmburns on September 18, 2005, 04:07:55 pm

Title: Mpeg2 vs Avi
Post by: cmburns on September 18, 2005, 04:07:55 pm
How much does it affect you when you shoot HD and edit in MPEG2 compared to AVI?


How are you storing your HD footage?


It seems to me like we're in a tough tweener phase on HD and DV. I don't see how HD can get anywhere until they get the high capacity DVD's to market. It was the same with DV, it didn't take off until it was possible to edit it and store it to something convenient.
We're also in a tweener on camera storage. A few more years and we'll have 16gb SD memory that costs what 1GB does today. Then hopefully we'll be done with tape forever, and we can get HD-AVI in a prosumer level camera.
Oh and I guess the fact that a lot of people don't have HD Tv's is also a bit of a holdback lol.
Title: Mpeg2 vs Avi
Post by: Christopher Sanderson on September 19, 2005, 06:57:01 pm
I have never edited AVI so I cannot tell you. (my guess is that it rather depends on the codec within AVI since like QuickTime, AVI is a 'shell' for various codecs)

The comparison I can give in current-ish formats is HDV vs. DV. There is a small difference here since the HD workflow must accommodate the re-creation of key frames at the various cut points of an edit. This requires rendering the original footage to be non-key frame (lengthy) or rendering on the export or 'Print to Tape' (reasonable). The actual editing process of the HDV footage in Apple's Final Cut is essentially the same as SD DV. No hiccups that I have experienced.

I store the HDV footage on its original DV camera tapes and only use drive based media for the edit.

We certainly are in a 'between phase' in formats and I see HDV as a temporary format on the way to real 4:2:2 HD. Your observation that HD won't go very far without a release format is only partially correct. Obviously we can export to HD tapes or film but more importantly for me is the fact that down-rezzed HDV to SD 16:9 looks markedly better than SD DV. And the fact that the sales of HD-ready TVs are booming promises well for the introduction of inexpensive (albeit compressed) HD players of inexpensive media: HD-DVD or BluRay.

Tape will be gone when storing to disc is less expensive than storing to tape. My guess is that will take two years or so. Recording directly from camera to a FireStore portable drive is already a good option for many SD shooters and Panasonic is betting on their proprietary (but licence-able) P2 cards for their upcoming HVX 200 which looks to me like the next 'great' cam-corder.

CS