Why HDV rather then solid state?
 

I was in a discussion earlier with someone and we were talking about the sub $10,000 market and how it's now being flooded with HDV cameras. The there is the HVX200 which is sort of the oddball stuck in the middle. I remember when the HDV format was first mentioned and a lot of people sighed and said something like "great even more compressed then DV".

Both the XL-H1 and the HVX200 came out within close proximity of each other and within a reasonable price of each other.
But why did Canon choose HDV over a less compressed solution and a solid state recording medium like P2?

What is it about HDV that all the other companies besides Panasonic seem to like so much?

HDV is an efficient mpeg compression tool that sony, jvc and canon agreed on. Also, most pro-sumers will find it difficult to store solid state technology, especially when it only stores 8 minutes max in HD. Now i'm not pissing on the hvx, i'm sure it's a great cam and nor do i want to get into the artifact vs solid state debate. But in short it's about ergonomics and ease of use. HDV can be good. i.e. canon technology i have seen and heard that it is relativly noise and artifact free. I suppose it depends on the algorithm of the hdv in use. Anyway, i'm sure some techie can get into in more detail.

I think many people see it as a cheap way to get HDV: you're getting high definition onto the same cheap mini dv tapes as you were shooting dv...

The HDV standard states what an implementor must do - not how he is to do it. Cannon seems to have come up with a particularly good algortithm for estimating the motion vectors which are used to construct the B and P frames. I nor anyone else posting here seems to be able to come up with a way to break their CODEC. It's my personal belief that this algorithm is also involved in construction of F frames from i fields as motion estimation is the key to that process too. I have to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the HDV pictures from this camera. Where motion is involved they are much better than I expected.

Good question. One way to answer this question is to approach this from a different angle and ask the question, "What is it wrong with HDV?" Take a critical look at the HDV clips from the Canon XL H1. Are there areas that are seriously lacking, or does it hold up pretty well? Review the comments and experiences posted by the XL H1 owners on this list, and you will come to the conclusion that many users are quite impressed with Canon's HDV implementation.

Best,
Christopher

The reason all the other camera manufacturers besides Panasonic adopted HDV
has to do with extending DV into HD for Consumers and Prosumers. Consumers are not going to spend thousand of dollars on storage to shoot a few minutes of home movies. Prosumers might. Panasonic didn't sign on to HDV so they don't want to make it. Panasonic is using P2 for Professionals and is trying to suck the Pro DV users out of tape into a new workflow because they don't want to make HD or DVCPRO50 decks at low prices.
Almost all the technical arguments against HDV come from Panasonic saying it isn't good enough. People who don't like Long GOP recordings etc. Almost all the arguments for HDV come from the manufacturers who are trying to sell it. Inexpensive tapes recording better signals. Good enough is a moving target and very often succeeds in the marketplace. When compact flash cards or other memory systems get big enough and cheap enough then HDV will fade away. This could be ten years or it could be shorter.
Canon, Sony and JVC went HDV as they realized they could record a very high quality signal using a proven technology at a low cost. The cost and workflow are similar to DV.
Panasonic decided we would need a new technology to go with the quality of HD they were comfortable with. You will see very few consumer P2 cameras but there are already many consumer HDV cameras.
Of course professionals are all going to try and record to harddrives and not use tapes as masters so it may not matter if there is an HDV tape drive in the camera but it could be a great cheap back up. The Panasonic offerings have many advantages but cheap is not one of them except for the cost of the camera itself.

i think the original question mix several concepts that should not be.
first HDV is not tape. HDV is a kind of MPEG2, that can be stored on tape, disk or solid state.
The same for the HVX200. The codec is DVCPro, as well can be stored on several media.
Problem 1, DVCPRO50 or 100 cannot use DV tape technology (limited to 25Mb/s), so too bad for the cheap storage.
Problem 2, HDV is limited to less than 25Mb/s to fit the old DV tape technology, so bye bye 4:2:2, short GOP and high quality.
HDV is currently under 25Mb/s, but could be as well upgraded to higher bandwith, but then it will be the same problem as on the HVX200, you need to find a media that can eat data so fast.
As soon we will se an easy, affordable technology (hard disk probably) able to support bandwith over 25Mb/s and offering better capacity that solid state, there will be no more competition between HDV or DVCPro.
I am pretty sure that HDV can do better than DVCPro at same bandwith (50Mb/s), since it is already comparing well with DVCPro at only 19Mb/s.

Absolutely false. You are sadly mistaken. It's not as if they don't "want" to make inexpensive HD tape decks... they can't make inexpensive HD tape decks. Don't you think, that if they could make a DVCPRO HD tape transport for $1,000, they would do it, and own the market by flooding it? It's utterly an ridiculous proposition to assume that professional HD tape transports are priced high artificially. This gear is expensive to sell because, like Sony HDCAM decks, this gear is expensive to make. What's great about P2 is that it offers the single least expensive, most affordable way to shoot in the DVCPRO HD format, and it completely bypasses the video capture process associated with tape.

Wrong again. Almost all the technical arguments against HDV come from punters who have never used it.

Most likely you'll never see a single consumer P2 camcorder, not for awhile anyway. And currently there are not "many consumer HDV camcorders," there are actually only a handful: three from Sony, one of which is discontinued. JVC and Canon have not yet entered the consumer HDV market (JVC had one consumer camcorder before the format was officially adopted).

The first but not the last step down the "price ladder"

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content...o-04_18_04.htm

Cheers

Hans

that is exactly what i said.
the last picture of the presentation says "Mpeg 720p/1080i", so it will be not DVCPro, but rather an HDV signal stored on P2.
That should artificially increase the capacity of the P2 card, since a 4 GIG card will be able to contains a lot more of video at 19mb/s than it could at 50Mb/s.
The problem with this, it is that it does not push Sony to go to an HDV at 50Mb/s, but rather to offer the same kind of product (4 gig memory stick ?), so the race is now more on storage than on increasing quality (or bandwith).
That seems a no-way direction, since HDV can be easily stored on cheap, big hard disks, so solid state, will probably never compete neither in price nor in capacity with HDD.
The worst thing is they can even decide to offer "HD" at broadcast speed (less than 10 Mb/s) so they still can say HD, sell cheap & slow solid state memory and tell the customer that it's progress.
On the other hand , they can devellop the PRO equipment by increasing HDV to 50mb/s (blu-ray ?) so there will
be a definitive difference between consumer and professional equipment.
The Sany HD1 is a good example at how low you can go and still say "HD", and the worse of it is you will find many people saying: "after all , it is not so bad"

That's a two-year-old link to something that officially doesn't even exist. You certainly can't buy one today anyway. One quick note, by definition, HDV is in fact tape-based, according to the HDV consortium. All HDV camcorders and decks include a tape transport. If they don't, then they're not HDV. Panasonic and other manufacturers may introduce their own HD encoding processes that are *similar* to HDV, but they certainly won't be referred to as HDV. Hope this helps,

This is only true because the market is tiny. If there was a consumer application for the same technology, these decks could be produced much less expensively. But the consumer application for such decks is not there - tape is on the way out.

Although I don't have any figures to back this up, I'm quite sure that the ever improving video capabilities of digital non-SLR still cams are eating up consumer camcorder market volume. And what are the digicams recording video on? Correct: solid state media. Face it, that's where it's heading. Kill all the moving parts, and you've taken care of many, many points of potential failure. And the larger the market for solid state media, the cheaper it will become. It will still be a while until you can buy a DV/HDV-tape's worth (12 GB) of solid state media for todays cost of high-quality tape stock. But I won't be surprised if it will be nearly that cheap at the end of this decade...

Absolutely right, but that doesn't alter the fact that it is true nonetheless. And I agree with the rest of your comments right down the line.

HDV is a wonderfully practical solution to the challenge of capturing high-definition video at a reasonable price, both in terms of the cost of the cameras and the cost per hour of recording. Consider that standard flash memory currently costs ~$40-60 per GB compared to ~25 cents per GB for DV tape, and it's not hard to figure why HDV makes sense for now. In a few years the cost of flash memory may drop to the point where tape is no longer relevant, but we're a long way from that today.

A better question would be why someone doesn't make a camera designed to record to standard 2.5" laptop hard drives costing ~$1 per GB at today's prices. For example, the HVX200 is a perfect size to have a slot for a removable hard drive molded into the bottom of the camera, instead of attaching an external hard drive recorder as many people will now do. The end result would be the same for many users at a small fraction of the cost per hour of recording time, resulting in a camera more useful to more people without waiting for flash memory prices to plummet.

But have no fear: it looks like flash memory recording is likely to be quite common in the future. I'm guessing about five years or so before it becomes pervasive.

"press conference is September 2006"

The biggest single roadblock to getting good mpeg-2 compression is noise. Doesn't matter if it's for DVD or HDV, noise is a killer. If you start with a clean signal HDV compression will work very well, feed it video with lots of noise and things will go downhill very quickly. Also bear in mind that HD broadcasts are delivered via mpeg-2 compression at lower bandwidth than HDV. Worse still more of that 19.5 Mb/sec bandwidth is used up by audio than with HDV.
Sure the encoders used for DVB are more capable / expensive than what's crammed into silicon in a HDV camera but it's pretty easy to reduce a box full of silicon into a chip these days and from what I've seen of HDTV the same issues arise despite the expensive encoders.
Certainly moving away from tape is very attractive. Sony have their XDCAM system which seems a better approach than P2, the media is cheap enough to be used for archiving, something I doubt we'll ever see with HDD or P2 solutions.
P2 was developed as a ENG solution, just why it failed in that market and XDCAM is taking off big time is an interesting question, probably related to the archiving issue.
The CineAlta XDCAM cameras are recording 'HDV', at higher bitrates.
Once video is being recorded as files you're free of the bitrate issues you have with tape, there's still write speed issues but you're not locked to a bitrate set by the tape transport.

No doubt the next big thing for affordable HD will be MJ2K.

Chris ,
You are misreading my words and their intent. Probably not worth responding to but you are making as many mistakes in your analysis of my understanding of the issues as you accuse me of. You obviously haven't seen a Panasonic presentation where they compare HDV to DVCPRO 100HD.They have a very technical way of saying we (Panasonic) don't think it is good enough to use. Full size HD decks and cameras using the technology of tape at the high levels are expensive to make. I never mentioned a dollar figure for inexpensive decks but you did. However Panasonic has been consistenly more expensive in delivering DVCPRO decks with firewire than Sony has been with DVCAM decks with Firewire. Maybe some of it because of their choices.
Obviously HDV decks are not anywhere as expensive to make as DVCPRO 100 decks but Panasonic doesn't support the format. However if they "wanted to" the HVX-200 could probably have been an HDV camera as well as a DVCPRO HD Cam without very much effort. The price point might have been a little different. No one on the consumer side is telling Panasonic they can't sign on to the HDV format it is Panasonic who is decided they don't want to. There is a reason Lanc is a Sony protocol which Canon uses but Panasonic doesn't. It isn't because Panasonic couldn't design it that way.
P2 is a design which takes the load off Panasonic making an inexpensive transport work too hard and puts the load on the user to come up with a way to store the footage elsewhere. This will eventually be a good bet as P2 cards become much bigger and cheaper. They hope this is going to be more profitable for them. As for P2 being least expensive way to record DVCPRO 100 that is not true. The current least expensive is going from the HVX-200 right to the computer or even the Firestore if it works since the cost of P2 is still so high and capacity so short that most people seem to be looking for cheaper solutions.
As for who has made the best choices the market gets to decide. If Sony XDCAM HD beats out P2 it will be because $30 for recording and storage of footage is more important than solid state. If HDV cameras have harddrive recorders then being able to store your footage on tape as a back up sounds like cheap insurance. If HDSDI recorders come into range then DVCPRO HD might not thrill people as much in the future as it does today.
I still don't know what Panasonic is going to do for the consumer market unless they just want to forget about the idea of HD for consumers

Yes I have seen that presentation; I've sat through it several times. I'll stand by my words: more people have been influenced against HDV by reading punters on the web who have never had their hands on the gear, than by Panasonic's seminars.

Actually the cassette size itself doesn't matter that much. But it's nice to see that you agree with me that they're expensive to make, because previously you had said "they don't want to make HD or DVCPRO50 decks at low prices." Obviously they would if they could, because that's good for business.

Incorrect. The pricing between DVCPRO and DVCAM is actually very close, with DVCAM actually slightly more expensive. The Panasonic AJ-SD255 VTR with FireWire is $5300. The Sony DVCAM DSR-1500A with FireWire is $5600 (these are current prices from B&H). You might have been confused on this issue because there is no DVCPRO equivalent of the $1800 Sony DSR-11.


Effort isn't the question; cost is. The DVCPRO HD tape transport chassis is incredibly expensive relative to the DV or HDV mechanism. Its cost is roughly $16,000 for the works. To record DVCPRO 100 to tape would have been ridiculously expensive and would have negated the low price of the HVX200, which is one of the biggest selling points of that camera. Giving the HVX200 an HDV tape transport certainly would have required a tremendous effort, considering that Panasonic isn't a member of the HDV consortium.

For DVCPRO 100? The price point would have tripled! That's not "a little different."

And that's their business to do so.

That reason is because Sony invented it; they're not about to license it to Panasonic, their arch rival. Sony and Canon trade technologies back and forth; Canon dropped LANC from its consumer camcorders a couple of years ago but still pays the per-unit fee to have it in their three-chip camcorder line.

I'm not following you. Panasonic has designed their own auxiliary camera control protocol. If you ask me it's better than LANC; the second Cam Aux jack on the HVX200 and DVX100B allows for remote iris control, which is something you don't get with LANC.


Let's keep this relative and realistic please. A couple of P2 cards together are less expensive than the FireStore FS-100 will be, and much less expensive (not to mention more practical) than a computer. As far as storage and archive solutions are concerned, DLT is less than half the price of a DVCPRO HD deck, the media is less expensive than DVCPRO HD cassettes, and DLT preserves all the P2 metadata which would have been lost when going to DVCPRO HD tape. Again, the advantage of P2 is that it offers the single least expensive, most affordable way to shoot in the DVCPRO HD format, relative to existing tape-based DVCPRO HD cameras and VTRs.

Shame on you for injecting superlatives. This isn't about who beats who, or what is "best." This is about choosing a format which suits an individual's needs and desired workflow. All of these different formats have their various niches, and their specific customer bases. The primary purpose of this message board isn't to argue about which manufacturer should have done what, nor is it about market share or who beats who in numbers of units sold. Instead it's about *using* the gear. If you're looking for a pointless argument about formats, you came to the wrong place.

why not mpeg4-based codec? cause it's lossy?

quote :"DLT is less than half the price of a DVCPRO HD deck"
If you live in IT world yo would know that DLT is dead since a long time.
too big drives and tapes , to slow read and write, too small capacity.
inertia still makes it a good support for making DVD, that 's all.
at 40 Gig/tape it is not good either for HD video, and high price does not make it an alternative for general consumer.
LTO (or AIT if you are for SONY) is the current format (200 gig/tape) but
it is expensive and harddisk capacity are offering same range for a lot lower price (cost per gigabyte in hardisk is 0.5$ at best today), so you can buy several terabytes of hard disk storage with the price of an LTO drive and and a bunch of tapes.
Additionally, handling tape is painfully slow. HDD embbeded media and reader in the same boxe, with possibility to read anywhere at high speed, just with the help of an USB box for example, while you will have an hard time to connect an LTO or DLT drive with SCSI-3 connection elsewhere than on the machine it is usually connected.

My apologies, it is in fact LTO that I should have been referring to all along, not DLT. I'm beginning to wonder how much post editing I'd have to do to correct that. Despite its cost I still think it's viable, especially for those who "must have tape." Were I working with P2, I'd probably choose drives over LTO for archival. The point is that LTO is one of many available options.