Do hd dv compressed files cause quality loss when editing?

compusolver
Member

For the authoring of blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, you probably want to stay with an HDV format camera, as the Mpeg-2 stream requires no re-encoding for those formats. You should be able to just drop in your timeline to the Authoring software and go. No lengthy compression time required!
- John Burkhart

John, I didn't want to hijack that last thread, but I'm curious - I have an FX1, but no Blu-Ray or HD DVD burner yet (are there any HD DVD burners?)... Will the fact that the captured files are mpeg2 (already compressed) hurt when re-editing with compositions, effects, etc.? In other words, to do this with standard video, the quality would go down the tubes - how about with hi-def?

Posted 5 years ago #
cfulton
Member

I'll take the HD DVD burner question and leave the rest for John...

Yes, Toshiba has finally (!) announced HD DVD burners--the SD-H903A is the desktop drive and the SD-L902A is the notebook drive. Check them out at sdd.toshiba.com, they're at the homepage now.

The thing with HD DVD is that it doesn't look like there's much software at the moment that will actually burn to that format. I know DVD Studio Pro can create HD DVD disc images, but it's unclear whether it actually allows burning of HD DVD directly from the app. We also saw a demo of the current version update of Pinnacle Studio, which includes the ability to burn HD DVD data structures to regular ol' DVD media, yielding about 20 minutes of HD content. We're half-expecting to see some software developers ship patches to add HD DVD capabilities to their products, and we're expecting that future software versions will support both formats, but at the moment it's slow in coming. But hopefully the resources of most software developers are either working on making more video software play nicely with Vista or adding to HD capabilities...

Posted 5 years ago #
jburkhart

Well in editing, most software packages take great care to keep the HDV in its pristine state. However, when you finish the edit go back out to tape, you will have to re-compress the mpeg stream, (also called conforming) and this does cause slight quality loss. With decent workflow, you should only have to recompress only once for everything (titles, graphics effects etc.)

Keeping this in perspective though, all this data is digital, meaning that its pretty robust. I'd much rather watch a 5th generation recompressed HDV, than a second generation analogue Hi8.
John Burkhart
Editor-in-Chief
Videomaker

Posted 5 years ago #
compusolver
Member

Thanks, Charles & John!

It seems the more answers I get, the more questions I have!

We also saw a demo of the current version update of Pinnacle Studio, which includes the ability to burn HD DVD data structures to regular ol' DVD media, yielding about 20 minutes of HD content

But this won't playback HD on a regular DVD player, right? What does it take, a Blu-Ray?

Has the delay of HD-DVD tipped the scales toward Blu-Ray? I'm reading that it has, but am wondering if those writers are grinding axes for Sony.

As for re-compressing HDV, I sure hope the quality loss is less than with SD. which in my experience has been worse than tape-to-tape analog copies of 8mm (that's right - 8mm, not even hi-8). But then, my Sony 8mm cam was top-of-the-line back in the 80's.

Posted 5 years ago #
cfulton
Member

I think the Pinnacle software burned discs that could only be played on HD DVD set-top players (and the demo we saw included the use of Toshiba's original HD DVD set-top player). A regular DVD player would probably just give an error message. Not sure what a Blu-ray Disc player would do with one of those discs, either--although they both rely on the same MPEG-2 codec that would have to be capable of handling bit rates up to 25Mbps.

Then again, I also can't see why there couldn't be a way to also include a regular ol' VIDEO_TS folder for standard DVD-Video compliant menus, video, etc. The only side effect I can see is that with both types of video on the disc, the available bits would vanish really fast...

Posted 5 years ago #