Dv shooting
 

Does anybody shoot in DV anymore or has it gone the way of the 8 TRAC.
I guess my question is i have A program ADOBE 6.0 WITH PINNACLE All set up
on one of my computer never use it. Is worth any money
thank you
Joe

I just did a 6 hour seminar yesterday. 2 cameras (JVC HD250s) and we shot DV the entire day. That's what the client wanted so that's what they got.
99.9% of what I do is still shoot in DV or DVCAM depending on what the client wants.
My weddings are still done in DV.
When I finally do upgrade to doing them in HD(V) I'll still end up producing an SD product unless an HD product is specifically requested by the client.

Hmmm.... I say hang on to it a while longer. Many people (especially business) are behind the times. I always loved the TV ad "Working at the speed of business". I've found even Fortune 500 companies to be a decade behind where they need to be. The only thing slower for adoption was perhaps broadcasters and dead last colleges. So for those people I would say keep the DV editing station a while longer. A certain TV station in LA last year had about a half million dollars to upgrade their cameras and gear. They bought all SD DV. Incredible. Idiotic. Short sighted. Criminal. Well at least he ordered digital and didn't buy analog. Oh well, hope he got a deal on all the crap that the local broadcast suppliers couldn't give away.

I sometimes shoot DV for (you guessed it) the local college for pro-bono since their editing gear is (you guessed it) DV only. All of the employees have HDV of some flavor, but the school has no way to edit it, and is not likely to be able to afford an upgrade for another year or two. As it is, programs are being cut and instructors laid off, and others being taken from full time to half time. So no one is going to waste money on some small AV department to make HD anything, especially since they don't have the bandwidth to stream it. Other colleges are far worse off. Other colleges are losing departments such as MATH or History. So if they are that bad off, they are not going to upgrade either. In fact they are probably hoping their AV person quits.

Businesses are also in the upgrade later or when it's life or death issue. $50,000 bonuses per person for guys in suits and ties rewards for not spending money reinvesting in their own infrasture is commonplace today, ( as I stand on my soapbox), very much in the news on a daily basis for looking at where our tax dollars have been donated to, such as certain car manufacturers and banks. So for all of these companies, expect to use DV for a while longer.

But for everyone else, including the soccer moms wanting good widescreen DVD's to play on their plasma HDTV's, I shoot HD for everything. Even my grandfather has a HDTV Plasma.

So yeah, keep it for a while I guess. Besides you might be working on a HD project for your own documentary film, and wouldn't mind having a whole other SD/DV setup for the other project for whom ever and let both work and render seperatly.

SD vs HD
 

I can tell you that if you work for European national news outlets, you'll only shoot in SD. Sky are moving over to HD in a few months. Al Jazeera prefer HD. But Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finns; the BBC, ITN, Channel 4 - they all want SD for their news and current affairs feeds.

Of course, over here we have PAL SD, not NTSC, so the difference isn't SO huge. But even if I shoot in HDV, I end up down-converting for broadcast 'cos the end-users don't have the technology to output in HD.

And since a lot of news feeds go out over the internet, compressed to around 60Mb a minute (MPEG4), there's no point in shooting in anything faster than SD anyway.

Funny. I somehow feel bitter about this thread. Maybe I should pick up a used Sony DV-Cam shoulder rig for $1,800 or so and beat that to death for the next couple of years. I say it in jest, but it almost makes some weird sort of sense to me. Oh well.

bitter?
 

Alex, surely you're not bitter to have discovered that we consumers have been more or less forced to spend our bucks on kit that isn't really necessary? Bitter that big corporates are mostly interested in persuading "opinion leaders" like us to buy the latest system/codec/format, so that the gullible masses think they should buy this stuff too? Bitter that perfectly good equipment is considered to be redundant and outmoded as soon as its out of the box?

It's the substance, not the style, that matters. Everything else is just marketing.

Have a good weekend.

R

The reason I'M thankful for shooting HD now is for web video (I shoot 720P). No more interlacing artifacts!!! All my "media" delivered footage (well 98%...) is still SD on DVD but I don't regret making the switch at all. But I DID make sure to buy cameras that still shoot DV in case I need to. I actually use DV mode for multicamera live switched application - the low light capability is about 1 - 1.5 stops better.