[MacDV] HD DV

[Thubten Kunga]

Wow! That is an excellent and succinct explanation of what JVC is 
offering and why we shouldn't settle for it if our intention is to 
produce HDTV. Thank you. I felt I had to change the name of this string 
on behalf of your super analysis.

Perhaps others here have additional insight as to what we can look 
forward to in the HD DV arena later this year?

Kunga

On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 07:35  PM, Richard Brown wrote:

> DVCAM/MiniDV has a data rate of  25 Mbps, or just over 8 MB/sec at 
> about a 5:1 compression ratio. The spec of DVCAM is equal or superior 
> to Betacam in every important category, according to the SMPTE.  High 
> definition MPEG 2 (which the prototyped JVC High Def DV uses to 
> record) is spec'd by broadcasters at 19.4 Mbits/sec, which implies 
> tremendous compression, perhaps 30:1. Basically, DVCAM and MiniDV 
> should visually wipe the floor in terms of picture quality with JVC's 
> consumer high def in terms of compression artifact degradation.
>
> The JVC High Def DV uses a special (unto JVC alone) recording process 
> because it is recording highly compressed MPEG-2 high definition video 
> onto the MiniDV tape. The fact that it is so compressed will allow 
> ordinary Firewire and ordinary hard drives to handle the content. This 
> is not broadcast quality high def by an stretch of the imagination. 
> The inevitable presence of compression artifacts will also make this 
> consumer high def useless for esoteric things like transfer to film. 
> It's one thing to blow up clean video, and quite another to blow up 
> uncorrectable compression artifacts. SDI video on DVCAM would look 
> soft due to the tremendous up-resolution required, but the JVC 
> consumer HD will shout its compressed origins under such conditions.
>
> The BIG question will be -- how will this JVC oddity fare in post 
> production? MPEG - anything has always been intended solely as a 
> distribution (after the Final Cut - pun intended) medium, and has 
> never been consider a viable editorial medium EXCEPT for online 
> compressed streaming content purposes.
>
> However, given the fact that a large segment of the television viewing 
> public apparently enjoys highly compressed, horribly artifact laden 
> (wherein a movie like "The Others" has dozens of unintended additional 
> apparitions), the puzzlement becomes - as the viewing public accepts 
> lower quality for quantity, will an independent producer be able to 
> take advantage of this odd JVC concoction without the public taking 
> notice? The near term novelty of HD TV might fuel this possibility as 
> well...
>
> Richard Brown
>
> On Thursday, January 16, 2003, at 11:19 AM, Thubten Kunga wrote:
>
>> FireWire is 50 MBytes/sec (400 bits dIvided by 8 bits per byte) while 
>> FireWire 800 is 100 MBytes/sec (800 bits dIvided by 8 bits per byte) 
>> sustained throughput. This is analogous to the old ATA66 vs. the 
>> newer ATA100 IDE spec. I think that we will be needing FireWire 800 
>> to transfer HDDV from our High Definition DV cameras and desks that 
>> will be coming to market later this year.  > 
>> http://www.supervideo.com/jvc.htm
>>
>> Anyone on the list have any experience with High Definition DV yet?
>>
>> k
>>
>> On Thursday, January 16, 2003, at 11:08  AM, Michael Winter wrote:
>>
>>> On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 11:57  AM, XXL wrote:
>>>
>>>>> The bandwidth for firewire 400 is so much greater than you need 
>>>>> for dv
>>>>> capture that there is enough room to pass the video thru the 
>>>>> harddrive into
>>>>> the computer and then record it onto the drive.
>>>>
>>>> According to Maxtor engineers, FireWire 400 is the limiting factor 
>>>> in
>>>> performance in many drives now.  It is claimed that newer drives 
>>>> are faster
>>>> than the bus. ..just what I read.. Have no idea if it is actually 
>>>> true.
>>>
>>> From the research I've done speccing drives, you're information is 
>>> correct, at least with respect to sustained transfers.
>>>
>>> However what the previous poster was referring to is that a real 
>>> time video stream has a fixed bandwidth that is much lower than the 
>>> 400 Mbps that Firewire provides. So it doesn't matter how fast 
>>> Firewire or the drives are, as long as they are faster than the DV 
>>> stream(s) (which they are -thanks sb).
>>>
>>> -Mike