HDV, SD, and 24p

[AfroNinja]

Just bought a sony handcam hdr-hc5. Wanted the hc7 but it wasn’t in stock, figured hc5 would be sufficient.

Main question: should I shoot in DV or HD 1080i?

I want to make amateur videos. Be it skits. comedy, or whatever. I assume my main audience would be youtube, or any flash/video distribution site. So SD seems to be the choice. But having a HD source file is always a good thing, in case I want to take it to a larger medium. But would full-quality SD be just as good too?

my other concern is the aspect, 16:9. Wide angle is not an option for HD, it’s always 16:9. Which means anything in youtube format gets black barred. And if I need to mix my HD footage with something SD, the change from bars to no bars makes it odd. So if I drop down to SD, then I might as well do SD 4:3

lastly, the 24p issue. I didn’t find out until after buying my camera that using 24p produces a psuedo-film effect. To my knowledge, my camera does not support 24p recording, although in premier cs3 (my editing program) I can create a 24p project. I assume this does nothing unless the source video is recorded in ’24p’. Will starting a standard project and exporting at 24 (or even 25) fps help a little bit? I exported a file at 30 fps and it seemed way too.. er.. smooth.

[Anonymous]

Great questions here. In our December issue (which hits shelves on the 13th of November) we have a column written specifically to address shooting in 16:9. I suggest you give it a read. But, this is the forums after all, so I’ll paraphrase some main thoughts. Shooting 16:9 will help you in the long run as TV standards continue to move towards the latest 16:9 standard. The good news about YouTube is that they will now take 16:9 footage and throw the letterbox bars on there for you. This helps you save time and, I suppose, years from now when most everyone is posting 16:9 footage to YouTube, those bars will disappear and you’ll see it for what it is. Shooting HDV versus SD does indeed have its perks. Generally speaking when you down-convert from HD to SD for YouTube, you video will look a bit better in quality. Lastly, if you want the 24p film look, you need to shot in 24p. However, there are some software plug-ins out there than will help mimic that in the common high-end editing applications. But in my personal opinion, it’s not worth the time and money. Not everything needs to look like film. The Coke/Mentos video didn’t look like film and I don’t think it held them back from any success.

Mark

[AfroNinja]

Thanks for the reply! I seem to be encountering two problems with the HD footage though. I just imported a clip from my camera and it brought it in as 5 different clips. And it was only about 20 seconds long. Not only can I not seem to find a merge option in premier (it’s probably there somewhere) but if this pattern continues then I hate to imagine how many clips it will split a 5-10 minute segment into. Although last night I recorded a 20 second clip in HD and it imported in all one piece :/ Also, the when I do playback in premier for HD video, the display is fairly jerky, and again I can’t seem to find the settings to lower playback quality (well, they’re grayed out actually) But if I use regular SD 4:3 video the display is much easier to watch, giving me a more accurate look at the final project Is HDV harder to work with for everyone else?

edit: so yeah, I’m thinking maybe I’ll do SD for now until I get a dual core computer or something…

[Anonymous]

Are you using Premiere Elements or Premiere Pro? The multiple clip problem sounds like you’ve selected the “Scene Detection” option upon capture. But, I’ve never encoutered this before. Your choppy playback however, is a more common issue. It could be the result of two different things, maybe even independent of each other. HDV footage requires more processor speed to uncompress all that HD data from the source files. So if you processor is not optimal for HDV playback with the software (check the specifications, look for recommended system info) then that could be your problem. It could also be RAM or a slow hard drive. But, I’m guessing it’s probably processor and ram, because technically SD mini DV footage and HDV footage have the same data rate, so if it’s smooth SD playback from your hard drive, it should also be smooth for HDV. So, check our specs with the recommended specs, and short of buying faster computer or more RAM, I’d suspect that maybe you’ll be doing more SD work than you intended.

Mark

[AfroNinja]

premiere pro cs3 (I bought the adobe creative suite)

My hard drive is serial ATA, and I have 2 gigs of ram, so those shouldn’t be a problem. My processor though is an Athlon XP 64 bit, decent, but a single core and maybe not quite up to HD video editing standards. sometimes I get choppy playback with SD too but not as much. Plus the SD takes much less time to render, naturally

I don’t use premier to capture footage, I use the handycam bundled software (should I use premiere?)

in the handycam program I have a detect scene option selected but the first time it worked fine, it only split the file where I turned the record off an on. But when I recorded today’s HD video it was a continuous shot for 20 secs. that got split up into 5 parts, so I dunno.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, I’d use Premiere Pro for capture and see if that fixes things. Again, I’ve never heard of this problem before, so the scene detection is my best guess. I think you right about dual core. You definitely have a good processor, but a dual core processor might be the ticket for smoother playback.

Mark

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