Production: HD – Apples to Apples
“HD” is a general term and it refers to High Definition. As you may be aware, it’s quite the buzzword these days. It seems that you can’t go a day without hearing about the latest in HD televisions and program broadcasts. But when it comes to your company’s specific video program, what should HD mean to you?
There are many comparisons among all of the different High Definition formats and the “best” of these HD formats, as well as which format or workflow is superior, is open to interpretation based on each user’s experiences. When considering a program in HD, always be sure to compare “apples to apples”. “HD” is a general term and it covers all High Definition formats, including HDV. However HD and HDV are not necessarily created equal.
HDV refers to a tape format that was really designed to be the replacement for the Mini DV tape format. On a DV videocassette, you can get up to a 1440×1080 frame size as opposed to most HD formats recording a frame size of 1920×1080. The basic compromise here is image quality.
When comparing all of the different HD formats, the disparity can be mind numbing. Be sure that when requesting project quotes, the cameras being used are compared equally. Format compressions can also be argued back and forth as to which is the best. Basically, the larger the image size and the less compression, the better your quality will be. So just shooting a project on “HD” doesn’t narrow down what you’re really going to get.
This is just a small nugget of a mountain of information that is yet to come in the basics of HD and HDV formats. As you well know, progress won’t slow down anytime soon and technology will continue to raise the bar in quality and cost-effectiveness. The prosumer/broadcast lines will almost certainly become even more unclear.
Whoever was quoted as saying, “You stop learning when you die.” may actually have worked in digital video production.
In the near future, we will be announcing some new video clip additions to our website, shot entirely in HD. So as they say in the industry, please stay tuned.
