William Hohauser |
January 5th, 2007 09:04 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomas Smet
It's not so much the format as it is the cameras themselves. While we are all shooting HD that blows away SD it still isn't up to snuff compared to the larger HD cameras.
With SD a 1/3" camera and a 2/3" camera still pretty much shot the same amount of detail and pixels. With HDV cameras there is usually some sort of trick done to create more detail then the chips are capable to do.
So far the JVC HDV cameras are the only cameras with the full native pixel count for that form of HD. With that said you really can tell the difference between a 2/3" 720p camera and a HD100. I was watching the Rose Bowl Parade on ABC which is 720p. Most of it looked great but there was shots from a blimp that didn't look as good. These were either shot with the JVC HD100 or the Panasonic HVX200. They were still HD but were not as crisp as the shots from the other HD cameras. You could also notice a lot more lens artifacts and tell the glass wasn't as good. This is why I think some networks try to limit the amount of HDV material because it doesn't match up 100% yet. it has nothing to do with the mpeg-2 compression but the raw detail and quality of glass.
I would say 1/3" DV to 2/3" DVCPRO 50 was about a 10% quality difference while 1/3" HDV to 2/3" DVCPRO HD is about a 25% quality difference.
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I agree with what you say here but I would be careful making judgements on specialty shots from blimps during a live broadcast. Unless you know for sure what camera was being used anything could have been on that blimp including HD security cameras. Also we don't know if there were any transmission problems that degraded the signal, I've seen plenty of those during HD live events.
I was watching a new science show on an HD public station the other day and the quality of the show varied widely from shot to shot. While an HD formatted show, some of the new footage was clearly up-rezed SD and the best I could guess was that an HD camera wasn't available for the entire production. Other footage was stock so the producers really had little control over the quality. Strangely, the worst looking footage was an interview shot with an HD camera but it was really hard for me to tell the reason. The lighting was certainly an issue for the particular subject but either the camera's detail was jacked up too high or it was a low-end Sony HDV camera or it was simply the MPEG compression during transmission that wrecked the image and the shot looks great on tape.
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