HD question

[Nick La belle]

Hi Husse,

Quality is more then pixel resolution. If you get a Sony HDV at 1440×720 pixels, that’s more pixels than you would get from your 720×576 Digi Ikegami camera. But I can tell you now that a $80.000 Ikegami has a better picture in SD than a $5.000 Sony in HDV.
It has to do with optics, lenses and electronics. Of course this is HDV here. In “real” HD like HDCAM and up, there’s some really good stuff out there. It’s also nice to have more pixels in HD if you want to do a lot of FX and compositing.
But to return to your post, I’ve been involved in a TV series that was shot in HDCAM for FUTURE PURPOSES. What went out to the broadcaster was a Digi Beta. We had done the editing in SD in FCP using the original HDCAM tapes, as the Sony machines have a SD SDI output. The SD copy of the eventual HD master didn’t look any better than the copies we had of the original footage.
So, if you want to make your shots look good, use a great camera, with great optics and a great camera person. Make sure the lights are great, the director of photography is great, and use a great colorist. If that’s what you’ve been missing in SD, it won’t be there in HD. No matter what a salesman will have you believe.

[Göran Thorén]

I totally agree with you when it comes to optics and other camera qualitys.
But I still wonder if there is a down converting loss or if the original pixel resolution
has any real meaning when going from for example HDV to DV or HD to digi or beta.

G

[Nick La belle]

I hope I understand what you mean. When you talk about “down converting loss”, I assume you mean you drop pixels, or lines, resulting in an image of lower resolution. The answer is, of course, yes, you can call that a loss. But the loss in image quality is not there in terms of artifacts, color shifts, or anything like that.
So the only “real meaning” of the original pixel resolution, is staying in that pixel resolution. Up sampling does not increase image resolution, while down sampling will decrease that resolution. But it’s not an issue that’s gonna kill us.

(Remember that our television sets and VHS recorders most often can’t display the full resolution of Standard Definition video. They will reproduce maybe 300 or 400 image lines. Still the X-files look great!)

[Göran Thorén]

.. that