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HD question
Is there any reason to shoot footage in HD if the final output is only going to be on a standard NTSC DVD? Many programs don’t seem to downconvert very well and it takes up a lot of extra time.
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12 Replies
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Ask three people this and you’ll get five answers.
Most of the answers will include the phrase: “it depends”.
Checklist:
Is it something ephemeral that is going to become “stale” very quickly and never re-used? If yes, then SD might be fine.
Is the main user only ever going to need it in SD?
Are your users actually happy with SD as long as it is letterboxed?
Is there a need or possible need for being able to change the camera framing in post, for example, to get around jump cuts from a badly shot single-camera interview? Then HD recording lets you do that and preserve SD quality.
Is this going to go up on the web ever, and if so, in an off-the cuff casual manner or a higher profile, pro-looking effort? For the quality version, and HD master can help. For the quick knock-it-out thing, SD should be adequate.
Is this something that might eventually be archived and re-used by some future film maker, and, part two of that, does that future film maker gain anything really from a framing change from SD 4×3 to HD16x9 in the raw footage? My own take on this has been, for something very static like a guy in a chair, alternating between medium and very tight shots, no; the 16×9 frame is, if not exactly “wasted”, at least it is not offering anything additional aesthetically, outside of some more leeway in positioning the framing. Now, if the guy is standing alongside an object or prop of some kind that’s part of the interview, maybe the wider frame and higher rez can be used to vary the shots in the future.
So those are the kinds of things I ask myself when I try to make this decision, case by case.
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Downconversion should work good on any software. If you have some problems here I should check my workflow. Usually going down from HD can increase detail.
Having said this I should always shoot and edit in HD when possible. Obviously if you are doing things for the web and you need to work fast in the editing etc… Ok .. shoot in SD. But to me is just a matter of speed. If you can afford a realtime HD workflow (so you have no time differences in shooting in HD, capturing footage, editing and rendering) I’d just go for HD
siRoma di Marcello Mazzilli
Corporate video productions in Italy
http://www.siroma.com -
I do it because the alternative is shooting DV and I don’t want to do that.
I shoot HDV 1080i and let the camera letterbox it when I capture. I have an Avid Adrenaline so HDV is not an option in post (even though they advertised it as HDV native). I’d rather shoot at higher rez and let it sqish the artifacts down so the eye doesn’t see em than proudly display 5:1 compression n a 4:1:1 color world. It marries me to a letterbox and I’m fine with that. I hate looking at 4X3 footage now. Just looks old fassioned to me.
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I agree shooting HD gives you more options, so I always shoot HD. You can always go SD from HD.
My normal workflow.
Shoot HDV 720P, ingest native, edit in FCP6, compress to SD for DVD. -
A lot of the footage I shoot ends up being archived for stock footage in future edits or recuts so it’s better to shoot HD for when NTSC and PAL SD is gone.
I know film makers who have made documentaries from mainly historic footage, actually just watched one tonight on broadcast television called “Christian the LIon”. It’s also had 12 million plus views on You Tube.
Wonder if the film makers that were shooting 8mm film of young lion playing in a London garden thought that almost 40 years later the vision would be so useful.
Cinematographer, Steadicam Operator, Final Cut Pro Post Production.
https://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/ -
hi i already posted this in a other thread but is also true here.
Without talking about all the other aspect of a camera that have influence on picture quality. sorry but i get technical here 😉
Mister nyquist has proved us that oversampling (what using a HD camera in a SD enviroment actually is) increase quality.
a HD camera will perform better in a SD enviroment due to the aperture effect. The optical path in a camera (this include the CCD) act as a lowpass filter that has a very slow roll-off (sinx/x)a SD camera will have a attenuation of detail near the half sample freq of 4dB. a HD camera has the same response but a wider frequenty range giving that on the same input frequentie (detail in a scene) the attenuation will be far less. resulting in a better rendering of detail.of coarse this does not take bad downscaling in account.
cheap camera’s will downscale badly and will have bad detail proccessing on there downscaled output’s.
so let your NLE do the hardwork since it has time for it.
greet
MauricePeople saying they don’t make mistake’s often make nothing at all!
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I would ask a different question. In the 21st century, is there any reason to shoot only in SD?
Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/ -
So for those who say downscaling isn’t a problem, what is your take on this article?
https://www.precomposed.com/blog/2009/07/hd-to-sd-dvd-best-methods/
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Few considerationss…
I come from PAL world (H=576) and not from NTSC world (H=480) and I think there are differences in converting down from H=108 (pal is 1,875:1 ratio NTSC is 2,25:2)
In the article there are at least TWO things I think are wrong.
1st he suggests MPEG2-I while you should use non-compressed codecs (or less compressed like Cineform on PC and Pro-Res on MAC)
2nd. Hollywood DVDs are double layer. That is 8.5 Gbytes and very rarely they use all bandwidth available. Sure they have dedicated softwares.. but bandwidth is not the main reason.
siRoma di Marcello Mazzilli
Corporate video productions in Italy
http://www.siroma.com -
hi mike.
my statement was a general statement.
and was without encoding steps.
in the article the originals where on HDV which is a enormous amount of compression. downscaling needs info which just is not there anymore in HDV.
shit in is shit out.
downscaling always has a price.
you want it cheap you get aliasing and ringing.
you want it good you have to sell the house 😉greet
MauricePeople saying they don’t make mistake’s often make nothing at all!
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