DV-25 and DV-50 quality comparison

[Barry Green]

For those who may not want to visit the other forum to read the methodology, let me be clear about a few things: 1) this was not, as Luis said, any attempt to compare cameras, and no reasonable conclusion about forthcoming cameras can be drawn from viewing this test. The recording format is just one element in the total image chain. A $25,000 SDX900 can shoot and record on regular 4:1:1 DV, the same DV format as used by a $299 Sharp ViewCam from Circuit City. But there will be a *world* of difference in the images. Cameras are far more than just their formats, and while the format is important, it is by no means the only thing that counts. So looking at this test and trying to extrapolate forward that an HD100 would be better than an HVX, or that an HVX would be better than a Z1, would be completely unsubstantiated speculation. A brilliant camera head, recording to HDV, could probably look much better than a mediocre camera head recording to DVCPRO-HD.

Also, you may ask why, on each picture, there’s only one picture for DVCPRO-HD and there are two for HDV. The reason is that DVCPRO-HD compression is the same no matter what the circumstances — it’s intraframe, and nothing that happens in any other frame has any influence on what happens in the current frame. But with HDV, that’s not the case — frames are dependent on what else is happening within a specific group of pictures. So for testing, I decided to test both extremes: HDV at the best it can possibly be, and HDV at the worst it can possibly be.

For the best, I used a still image for the entire GOP, giving the MPEG-2 compression its easiest task. For the worst case, I took scenes from 15 different productions and scattered one frame from each across the GOP, so that every frame was as different as I could possibly make it.

The truth is, HDV video will almost never look as bad as the “worst” shot, nor as good as the “best”, but somewhere in-between, depending on each scene, the amount of detail, the amount of change per frame, etc.

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[Luis Caffesse]

Barry, thanks for detailing the methodology here.
Looks great.

Luis Caffesse
Studio 3 Productions, Inc.
Austin, Texas