Gizmodo
Sony and Panasonic have finally figured out a way to get content from high-definition camcorders onto DVDs without going to Blu-ray. Create another new format.
Yes, if you aren't already confused by the frustrating format wars between Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD-DVD high definition disks, here comes AVCHD also created by Sony in collaboration with Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic). Since HD video contains about four times the amount of picture data as standard definition video, AVCHD uses the MPEG4 AVC/H.264 compression system to fit the information onto a standard DVD disk. Current high definition camcorders on the market, like Sony's HDR-HC3, record to Mini-DV tapes which have longer recording capacities but not the simplicity of DVD.
According to Yoshikazu Ochiai, a spokesman for Sony in Tokyo, about 20 minutes of HD video can be recorded on a single-sided DVD using AVCHD in the normal quality setting. That compares to about 30 minutes of video that can be recorded using a standard definition camcorder and the same disc. Mini-DV tapes can record about 60 minutes of video.
Ochiai noted that this new format doesn't mean Blu-ray is going away. The reasons Sony is not bringing Blu-ray to high-definition camcorders at this point, he said, include the high cost, size constraints and the increased energy consumption. —Dan Havlik
Comments
It would make me nervous to shoot on anything that uses lossy compression like mpeg4, etc. However, the Sony XD Cam footage that I have used before has some great color and looks pretty clean over all; and that uses an mpeg based compression on an optical disc.
I'm just a consumer level guy, but I thought most digital camcorders use lossy compression...
DV (and D8, for that matter) camcorders use a very editing-friendly mildly lossy format which stores each frame separately from other frames. Think of it as a series of jpegs at a very high quality setting. The benefit of this in later editing is frame-accurate cutting, whereas with MPEG and H.264, frames are inter-related in data to get better compression rates. Typically only every 15-th frame stands for itself and all inbetween frames are (without getting into the details) descriptions of differences between this one frame and the following frames. Editing this sort of material makes it very complicated to cut off the first 5 frames of this sequence, as you have cut out your reference frame out. Cutting DV footage is as simple as "chop off this frame here, chop off that frame there".
I liked a post I read on another forum about someone not liking do "digitize" off of DV tape and the reply was "you don't have to digitize, it's already digital". Made me laugh.
Start a discussion:
Login with your username and password below. Or comment on this post via email.
Forgot your username or password? New User?