No probs - understand now that I know your interested in HVX..

Interesting thread... What we really need to make all this work in everyone's favor is an open standards based HD format that is less lossy than HDV. If I am correct, DVCPro HD is based on Motion JPEG, which is an open standard, AFAIK. Given that, someone could indeed come up with a non-proprietary HD format with similar qualities as DVCPro HD. H.264/AVC could be up to the task, as well, and that's non-proprietary, but the compression may be lossier than Motion JPEG, I don't know.

Once a suitable format is in place, manufacturers such as Focus Enhancements (of FireStore fame) could develop ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) that would encode HD SDI on-the-fly. With the current roadmap of low-power, high-performance DSPs available from a number of manufacturers, it could very well be possible to even arrive at a portable design.

The 100 Mbps (Megabits per second) datarate of DVCPro HD was a good choice by Panasonic, IMO. It translates into 12.5 MBps (Megabytes per second), which current portable HDs and fast flash memory can handle well (as the P2 system proves). If a non-proprietary format would adopt a similar datarate, a DTD-device could write more than two hours of it onto a 100 GB disk. Not bad, I'd say.

Now I only wish such a device was already available on the market. And I won't be surprised if something along those lines shows up before long.

In the meantime, I agree with Chris: don't dismiss HDV. I have seen footage of Sony's prosumer HDV-line, and it was stunning. Granted, there's not much headroom for color correction or making up for lighting mistakes when editing. But if you get it right when you shoot it, the quality can be truly outstanding.

I'm very much eying the XL H1 as an upgrade for my XL-1s, particularly because it has HD SDI output. While I may not be able to utilize the HD SDI from the get-go in mobile applications, I'm quite confident that I will be able to do so at some point down the line before the rig becomes obsolete.

These are fun times!

Cheers from snowy Switzerland,

Ron

Edit: just checked up on H.264/AVC at Wikipedia (what a great tool!) --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H264
While it appears that the compression is higher than previous codec architectures (including MPEG-2, on which HDV is based), recently completed standardization on the so-called Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt) to the H.264/AVC standard are very interesting. Among other features, these extensions support YUV 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma sub-sampling and 10 or even 12 bit coding. Maybe H.264 is our savior? At any rate, I can recommend the Wikipedia article. It's a good read...