By Michael Grotticelli, June 23, 2004
NAB 2004 might be remembered as the year that the HDV (high definition digital video) format gained legitimacy among content producers, independent shooters and editors, as well as a large number of broadcasters, who showed considerable interest in the new gear on display for newsgathering.
Technical issues aside, when you are talking about 720p and 1080i HD video acquisition and playback at DV prices (under $4,000 for a camera), people in the creative community quickly become interested.
Because the new format employs the same cassette case, tape speed and track pitch as the now ubiquitous DV format, it's relatively easy for manufacturers to develop products that are compatible with existing DV-centric solutions.
Yet the format is not for everyone. There are detractors who say the format is limited and confuses people into thinking HDV will look similar on the screen to HD images captured with 100Mb/s equipment. They say HDV is using old compression technology (MPEG-2) instead of the new DVCPRO-HD or HDCAM codecs that do a much better job of preserving the original color information and keeping artifacts such as "banding" to a minimum.
"HDV muddies the waters," says Robert Goodman, a professional cinematographer in Philadelphia who is often employed for HD video shoots. "I think it's confusing to people both inside and outside the professional industry. I don't consider it true HD because does not offer the resolution of a true 1080i or 720p image."
Yet there's no stopping HDV's momentum. Last year JVC was alone in announcing an HDV offering, its JY-HD10U single-chip 720p HDV camera. It captures HD images at 25Mb/s on standard DV or Mini DV cassettes and uses MPEG-2 compression. At this year's NAB convention, JVC announced that it has sold more than 2,000 of its HDV cameras in the U.S. alone in the past eight months.
Under the banner "Affordable HD for Everyone," JVC showed a prototype of its three-chip, HD/SD switchable ENG/EFP style camcorder that is better suited (in terms of size and recording capacity) to broadcasters and production studio professionals. JVC's new HD camcorder will use three 2/3-inch CMOS imagers, each with a native resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, and will include an MPEG-2 encoder capable of both SD and HD recording, including HD at 24 frames progressive. The camera will utilize the HDV recording format, which delivers 276 minutes of HD recording on full-size DV media and 60 minutes of HD recording on Mini DV media. The company also showed real-time wireless transmission, via the WiFi standard, of HDV compressed video that looked quite good.
The demand for affordable HD cameras is being driven by consumers' increasing awareness of digital HD programming, even if the number of TV sets capable of watching it is still small-close to 3 million-when compared to analog television. It seems only natural that the popularity of the standard-definition DV format-nearly 1 million digital video camcorders were sold from January to April 2004, according to the Consumer Electronics Association-will migrate to HDV. The DV format is now commonly used in newsgathering, corporate videos and independent documentaries.
The HDV format was defined in 2003 by a consortium of consumer electronics companies that included Canon, JVC, Sharp and Sony. The group made the HDV specifications open and available to anyone in the hopes that many would create complementary products that support it. HDV cameras use the ITU-R1394 interface for getting images off the tape and into a digital edit system.
It's often said that no new format can survive without support from a variety of industry players. Due to its open spec, HDV now enjoys widespread compatibility with a number of systems and technologies from a collection of companies that span the entire production and post chain.
Sony showed a new prototype HDV camera, and at least eight editing systems at NAB 2004 claimed to support the format-some natively, some not-including those from Adobe Systems, Apple, Avid Technology, Canopus Co., KDDI R&D Laboratories, Pinnacle Systems, Sony (Vegas) and Ulead Systems. Miranda Technologies and Sobey Digital also displayed HDV-compatible products in Sony's NAB booth.
"We're opening the door of HD to everyone," said Dave Walton, national marketing communications manager for JVC Professional Products Company. "This [format] is something that's needed because until now HD has been relegated to the elite."
While comparable to the DV format in many ways, HDV offers less color information (4 bits versus DV's 8-bit processing)
. It does, according to the HDV consortium, feature advanced signal processing technology that provides significantly better image quality than DV. HDV proponents contend that by changing the error correction method from error correction within a track (as specified in the DV-SD format) to error correction among multiple tracks, the HDV format offers improved error correction capability and enhanced resistance to lost data caused by dropouts.
Editing with the HDV format's long GOP, MPEG-2 compressed images is also not without its limits. HDV's interframe-compressed MPEG-2 format enables good quality video at lower bit rates, which means more content per tape, but the interframe compression increases the difficulty of editing the content because all of the individual frames of a video are not available to the editor all the time.
Manufacturers have worked hard at providing a flexible platform from which to work. Pinnacle Systems, which offers several edit systems that support HDV, said in a white paper that editing standard MPEG intraframe-only (or DV) clips is straightforward. If a basic cut between two clips is made during an edit, then the resulting file is composed by joining the two clips together. If an editor chooses a transition between frames, only the frames of the transition need to be re-encoded and a new piece is joined into the output stream. There is little or no loss in quality at the transition point.
When editing frames that are encoded in Pinnacle's IBP format, performing a frame-accurate interframe cut or transition is not as easy. Achieving a near loss-free cut takes some custom methodology due to the fact that frames located between the selected ones are not available to the editor to manipulate. Pinnacle responds that its technology has perfected IBP editing so the user does not have to worry about it. The company's Liquid edit system will edit the HDV content (IBP encoded) as easily as it edits DV material.
Some of the camera companies of the original consortium, namely Canon and Sharp, chose not to introduce product at the NAB convention this year. Likewise, companies that have thus far stayed away from the DV format-namely Hitachi, Ikegami and Thomson-did not show HDV support.
Like virtually everyone rumored to be involved with HDV, Canon is continuing to evaluate the market demand before it shows any prototype models. Yet it's clear that with the overwhelming success of its XL1 DV camera, a new HDV version can't be far behind.
"Sure, we'll introduce an HDV camera at some point, but we want to be sure any product we put out will address the issues that video professionals are talking about and need," says Gordon Tubbs, assistant director, broadcast and communications division, at Canon U.S.A. "Those issues include, How can you effectively edit with it? and, How much quality can you get out of a 25Mb/s system?"
The success of Sony's DVX-1000 DV camera, which is being used by CNN and many other broadcast and professional production operations, is not being taken lightly. "We've seen how the DV format changed the professional production landscape in fundamental ways," says Craig Yanagi, system integration account manager for Sony's broadcast and production systems division. "Sony sees the same thing happening with HDV. People want high quality, but they need to keep the cost of the technology to a minimum to meet budget requirements. HDV solves both of those issues. Now that we've seen a variety of edit systems to support it, there's no turning back the clock. We recognize that the wave of demand is coming, and we intend to be ready for it."
He says Sony plans to show a working HDV camera at the IBC conference in September. At NAB, Sony also showed an i.LINK (1394) interface for fast HD-SDI conversion of material from tape to edit system hard drive, made by Miranda.
"Some people have asked us why we're coming out with yet another tape format," Yanagi said. "Our answer is that there's a huge potential market for people who want to shoot HD images now. They can go into any neighborhood store and pick up standard DV cassettes very inexpensively. That's a powerful message that users can really relate to."
It's clear that while there are skeptics who feel that the HDV format is not "real HD," there is value in the format for many types of professional applications. Many said that DV would not take off, that it would never be good enough for broadcast or professional use. Those critics are keeping very quiet these days as the number of television shows, independent features and documentaries shot on DV continues to grow.
A full list of HDV format supporters
is available at www.hdv-info.org/ support.htm.
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