Definition – High vs Standard & Nonstandard

[Peter Berthet]

Cathy it depends entirely on the work your doing, a client may want a job done in HD, or SD. So that will play a major role in which resolution you choose to go with.
Depending on which you choose, video file size and performance requirements on your computer WILL increase.
With this in mind, using a non standard resolution like 640×360; while not detrimental will not yield ideal results if say, you were making a standard definition DVD for a client who were to play it on a SD widescreen tv.
Ideally for standard definition you want to go with 720×480, as it will display correctly on a television set.

Its likely that your TV is up-scaling your 640×360 video to fit the screen. What this means is that your losing pixel information in the process, as the native resolution of an SD tv is in fact 720×576. so its essentially doubling or discarding some lines to fit the image to the screen and display it correctly.

All in all it comes down to what the client wants. Be it SD or HD, you may even need to update your system to something faster as HD becomes more standard.

~Peter Berthet
Sydney, Australia

[Vince Becquiot]

You have to watch out for pixel aspect ratios.

If the 640 x 360 AVI is 16:9, then it’s in square pixels. In order to get that to a widescreen DVD, you’ll have to first create a widescreen DV project. Then after import, right click the on file, interpret footage and make sure it is set to square pixels (1.0).

Then you will need to zoom the footage (if my calculations are right) to 133% in order to fill the screen. Then export to DVD.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mark Hollis]

You will create big files where you have HD video. That is just a fact of life.

One thing to look for is an appropriate codec to keep file size manageable and Avid has released DNxHD codecs to anyone and everyone. If you transcode HD to DNX 145, you’ll find smaller file sizes. But I cannot promise you that your computer will be able to play them back nicely.

To the extent I have worked with HD video (even compressed) I have always used a disk array striped RAID 0 or RAID 5 for speed. (RAID 5 gives you security as well if you have enough drives.)

So if you can get an e-SATA array to work with, you should find HD more palatable at HD resolutions.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Cathy Ralph]

Thank you everyone for your valuable time and information. I am not a working professional (I have no clients to answer to) I am just a 2D artist using the computer as an adjunct tool for my art and animation experiments. All this necessity of technology to continually upgrade and make things bigger – it scares me. So I think I will stick to my pen and paper which have not changed definition since the 1800’s. Thanks again.