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HDV ARRIVES |
Till today, digital filmmakers had DV, the standard definition Digital Video recording format; DVCAM, Sony's pro DV format; DVCPRO, Panasonic's High Definition format; and HDCAM, Sony's HD format and the industry paradigm highest quality HD. But now we have a new toy to play with, and it's not just for wide screen wedding videos.
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| Robert Moisan from Newtonville Camera, Newton, MA., takes Benjamin Ekstein of Diginnovations, Concord, MA, on a tour through Sony's first entry-level high definition video camera. | Beyond's Rony Sebok
demos HDV editing with Adobe Premiere Pro aided by CineForm acquisition software on the company's laptop model. Photos by Loren Miller. |
Sony positions the new HDV format between its DVCAM and HDCAM standards. Producers currently shooting DVCAM 16 X 9 or DVCPRO HD, or forced all the way into HDCAM, will be looking very carefully at the new toy. Its image is very pretty. New cameras have arrived to record it, and a new deck to play and edit it-on plain old 6mm MiniDV cassettes.
At a late November New England SMPTE meeting held at WGBH, Boston, we got a nice tour of HDV from Dr. Hugo Gaggioni, Chief Technology Officer at Sony. The HDV cameras are aggressively priced and packed with a zillion shooting amenities. Sony offers a consumer model without pro sound connectors and fixed settings; and a pro version with XLR audio inputs and many variables, including the ability to cluster a bunch of settings as a savable "workspace." HDV is described as an entry-level high definition format, which includes a robust error correction scheme, probably wise considering the quality of those little MiniDV cassettes, with their own dicey variables from coating to lubricants.
HDV tastes great, and it's less filling. The new Sony camera takes a swipe at Canon's and Panasonic's new prosumer DV models, which offer both straight DV 30-frame interlaced recording and 24P, for a more authentic "film look"- but in Standard Definition DV format, 480 lines resolution. Sony trumps these players by offering an inexpensive yet bona fide 1080-line CCD-that's the heart of the recording system, the chip where the image is received, light sensed and translated into data bits-and which at 1080 lines is true high definition as defined by the Advanced Television Systems committee.
What does this mean to producers, shooters, editors and us? For a couple thousand more than a high-end DV camera, you're into true High Definition video. For another couple thousand more than a DVCAM deck, you're into true HD playback and editing.
Engineering the editing path was a challenge. HDV is a flavor of MPEG-2. Sound familiar? It should, it's the current DVD format! It's how you view your movie rentals. And indeed, Sony is well aware that MPEG-2 is an efficient delivery format, excellent for storage but not an editing format. Out of the box you could not possibly edit MPEG-2 to any resolution finer than a second or so-24 or 30 frames is a lot of info in our business. Can't get to them, because they don't really exist in MPEG-2, except as cleverly "predicted" information between full frames of action. But Sony has hacked an insanely clever seven-step cascading processing system inside its diminutive HDV deck- one model for both consumer and pro use- to turn a highly compressed MPEG-2 recording into addressable digital frames suitable for editing. Thus you may comfortably expect all the major editing system vendors to accommodate HDV in 2005 as a codec choice.
In the big studio at WGBH, Dr. Gaggioni's PowerPoint presentation concluded and a bunch a television engineers, producers and editors clustered around the big HD set Sony brought in to show off demo HDV footage at both 60 field interlaced and 24-frame cinema mode. WGBH's supervising online editor Mark Steele was impressed. 'GBH editors Jon Dunoyer, Julie Kahn, and Harlan Reiniger, who work on high end Avids at the station and elsewhere, were impressed. Editors like Jeff Herzog of New England Aquarium, who drives a Final Cut Pro HD DVCPRO system, were also impressed. I had splurged on a nice Final Cut Pro DVCAM studio, and I was impressed!
"It probably won't hold up to repeated passes in and out of MPEG2 without the image breaking down," commented Mark Steele, "which is something I don't encounter with HD SDI, but as an inexpensive alternative for documentary and independent film production it looks like a big step forward."
To see practical HDV editing today, I visited 1 Beyond, a hard-working, committed, Somerville, MA David among the nonlinear editing Goliaths- those triple A's: Avid, Apple and Adobe. 1 Beyond is unique in the industry, with a mission approaching Apple's in attempting to integrate parts that really work into a trouble-free, turnkey HD editing and compositing solution on the PC platform, and to stick with their customers after the transaction.
At their November open house, 1 Beyond's CEO Terry Cullen and his savvy staff were showing working solutions for HDV editing, along with the usual established SD and HD formats- all on PC's, from powerful mobile laptops to heavy duty desktop workstations using 1 Beyond's own optimized Harmony™ Storage Area Network system and Redline Render™ rendering solutions- these folks think of everything needed in a serious edit.
One usually doesn't see this kind of integrative engineering activity outside of Avid's or Apple's R&D labs. ProMax of Irvine, CA comes to mind; they are platform agnostic with more emphasis on Macs. But for PC buyers, 1 Beyond has made inroads into places like ESPN and some regional heavy hitters are giving them a good hard look for their HD edit products. 1 Beyond is the kind of place you'd first expect to see HDV editing tools functioning.
The HDV editing solution demo'd at the open house had some minor glitches but showed promise; Adobe Premiere Pro- a PC-only editing product- was running HDV footage with help from another software tool, CineForm, which handled the transcoding from "air" to addressable frames. I found myself able to navigate the timeline and to me, it looked and behaved like any old 16 X 9 HD footage.
Whether or not your HDV show mastered to an HD deliverable is accepted for network broadcast is another issue; it's too new to tell. It could be as hot as hot yoga or cool off quickly- wasn't it only a few months ago Sony was showing us XDCAM Blue-Ray disc recording? But HDV is definitely here, it's poised to become a workflow choice, and choice is good.
