Dan,
You're impressively derisive toward HDV. Your profile indicates you shoot with an XL1s; since your last profile update, have you started shooting with HDV and been unhappy with the results?

We've established no such thing, and the answer to your question is that HDV works well to produce impressive image quality from modestly priced cameras. You keep saying how good H.264 is because the compression does wonders with a minimal number of bits, then dismiss the possibility that HDV could achieve a similar feat. That's illogical.

So it's idle speculation that it's difficult to get good image quality from a small number of bits, unless we're talking about HDV? Okay, got it. If you really think a $799 H.264 video camera could produce better image quality than current HDV cameras, that's good news for all the people who are saving up to buy an HVX200! :-)

P.S. No, I haven't done any H.264 encoding but I have seen some good examples -- some of it produced from HDV source footage. Have you shot any HDV footage?

Real-time hardware based h.264 encoding is already here...at least at the high end: http://modulusvideo.com/main.php?Page=20
This unit "wraps" h.264 encodes in the MPEG2 stream.

There is no question that h.264 is much more efficient than MPEG2, and of course requires more horsepower to process. If you read the spec at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/h264, it is rapidly evident why this standard does a much better job of higher quality encodes, at much lower data rates, than MPEG2.

Hardware decoding of h.264 is already implemented by the major players in the video card business. Hardware based encoding at the consumer level is obviously Ambrella's niche, and will be followed no doubt by many. I'd expect HDV to be replaced quickly by the MPEG4 variant. A lot of folks tend to assume that more compression is a bad thing...it's not, if the compression algorithm is more sophisticated. Just based on DV -> wmv encodes, vs. DV -> max bitrate MPEG2 encodes, I like h.264 better already.

Neros' recode, encodes h.264/mp4 with excellent results. You can download the trial (have to get the suite) and check it out yourselves.

In case I haven't made it clear already, I'm not in any way disputing that H.264 is more efficient *for a given data rate* than HDV/MPEG2. But to therefore assume an inexpensive H.264 video camera would inherently produce better video than current HDV cameras is silly, since the H.264 camera would probably use a much lower data rate than HDV. Now if you told me someone was proposing to record H.264 onto miniDV tape at 25 Mbps then that might be worth talking about, but I doubt that's something we're likely to see any time soon.

So much the better, and if you're not prepared to invest in HD recording and editing solutions yet then maybe that's a good reason to wait a while longer. But thanks to HDV it's now possible to produce decent high-definition output for basically the same price it cost to invest in DV a couple of years ago, and today's HDV solutions will still be useful well into the future. If anything's going to challenge HDV it will be something like the HVX200, not a consumer-priced H.264 camera.

kevin, you just told us that hdv has a lot less bandwidth per pixel than dvd... by your own admission, you lost the hdv vs. dvd argument, and therefore proved that hdv is a bogus format.

pete, perhaps you'd care to explain why anyone would want to acquire at less bandwidth than we currently deliver dvd product at?

compare that lousy hdv bandwidth to xdcam: "MPEG IMX can record at a bitrate of 30, 40 or 50 mbits per second".

no surprise there... fortunately there are several people in this thread who understand where the future of video acquisition is headed... i feel sorry for anyone who thinks that hdv is going to have anywhere near the shelf life of dv.

Unfortunately this thread has turned into a platform war, which is something that we don't allow at DVinfo. I'm closing it for now so the other moderators can decide what to do about this.

Dan, we understand that you don't like HDV, but you certainly haven't "proved that it's a bogus format." If it doesn't suit your needs then don't use it.