hd????

[Stephen Mann]

Lost’a questions (you didn’t teach grammar, did you?)

Basically, the FCC says that any resolution greater than 525-line SD is HD. That’s kind of like saying that any vehicle with more than four wheels is a truck. Lot’s of grey territory.

So, “what is HD” will get many answers, most of them right and practically all of them wrong – depending on whom you ask.

To the purist coming from the Million-dollar studio, “true” HD is 4K frames and 4:2:2 colorspace. But unless you want to replicate 35mm cinema performance (and costs), don’t listen to them.

Most of us pro-sumers shoot HDV or AVCHD. Both formats are a compromise, both have their strengths and weaknesses. It’s getting hard to find an HDV camera (my preferred format), so if your are buying new gear, it’s most likely to be AVCHD. The biggest problem with AVCHD is that it is extremely CPU intensive to edit. That means any PC with less than a quad-core processor will be a disappointment.

Delivery.
First, a disclaimer. Everything I do is delivered on an SD DVD because no client has ever asked about HD or BluRay. I haven’t experimented with HD disks yet.
You can put a few minutes of AVCHD on a 4.7Gb DVD, and *most* BD players will play it, but it’s not guaranteed by any stretch.
Many videographers are delivering Blu-Ray DVD using a BD-burner in their PC, and again, almost all home BD players will play these. It’s not unlike the early edition of DVD disks as the hardware and software were both a work in progress and early adopters were frequently challenged for results.

Hope this helps

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Sue Gessel]

Yes, your answers are very helpful! (you’re right – didn’t teach grammar) –
so how does this work – I shoot video with a Sony HDV HVR-Z1U camera (I know they don’t make them anymore) –
and I use HD background media (DigitalJuice types) in my production -and burn it on a standard dvd –
is there any possibilty of creating a HD product with these? And by HD, I mean a product that is the clearest, sharpest it can be if it is projected on a large screen. As we try different settings in Sony Vegas project properties and render settings, we run into problems of text, pictures, etc moving to different places on the screen in the rendered output.

[Dan Crandall]

Yes, you can burn HD on a standard DVD and it does work OK (but you will need a Blu-ray player to view it).
May I suggest you just “bite-the-bullet” and instead purchase a Blu-ray burner. I just bought one from Newegg.com on sale for $80 and Blu-ray media costs a little over $1.00 for a 25GB disk. After viewing your video and photos in Hi-def you won’t want to make standard def DVD’s anymore. It seems that Blu-ray is finally getting some traction in the consumer market. I completed a video project about a month ago and 50% of the recipients requested to receive it in Blu-ray format.

[Dave Haynie]

1. Can we produce/create/make HD videos on regular dvds with Sony Vegas? Or do we have to have Bluray disks?

There are any number of ways to deliver HD content. But as far as standard, DVD-like video discs go, there are only a few practical ones. The standard Blu-ray is the optimal format, and you can create Blu-ray discs using DVD Architect — it works exactly as it does for DVD.

The alternative is HD on a red-laser DVD. DVD Architect will allow you to create a Blu-ray compilation targeted for DVD, but it will only likely play on a PC. No significant number of plain old DVD players support any kind of actual HD (the did exist, but they’re irrelevant now).

The well supported format for HD on a DVD is AVCHD. Pretty much every Blu-ray player supports AVCHD DVDs, because this is a well known camcorder format. AVCHD is different in small ways than Blu-ray.. it’s limited to 18Mb/s data rates (basically, DVD x2), and there are few format differences. For no obvious reason, DVD Architect cannot make an AVCHD disc. You can use a freeware tool like multiAVCHD (Google it) to create AVCHD discs from an HD source. Keep in mind, though, this will only be useful for 30-60 minutes of decent quality video.

Online is another option. Most of the online video streaming services, like YouTube and Vimeo, now support at least some form of HD. It’s not as high quality as BD or AVCHD, but then again, it’ll play on any PC.

2. What exactly is HD? Like . . . can a photoshop file be HD? What determines HD?

There are various opinions. Over the years, the working definition is that, if you’re at 720×480 (720×576 PAL), or less, you’re in standard definition. If you’re at 1280×720 up to 1920×1080, you’re in HD. Anything in-between is dubbed “Extended Definiton”… ED. Anything better is probably classified in film terms: 2K (2000×1000 nominally), 3K (3000×1500), or 4K (4000×2000).

Photoshop deals with still images. If you’re using a digital camera that’s not hopelessly obsolete, you probably have more than 1920×1080 pixels available. Photoshop has no obvious limits on the size of the file you can edit… I’ve done 40+ photo composites from a 6-8Mpixel camera, and it was happy with that. You can use Photoshop-edited stills, backgrounds for greenscreen video, “Ken Burns Effect” videos made from still, etc.. here’s one I did, in Vegas, in HD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQGf7xjWc4E

For this kind of video, you actually want still images much larger than your target/ This was created in 1080p, but back then, YouTube only supported 720p uploads, so it was downscaled a little. Most of the photos here are either 35mm scans or digitals from a Nikon D70 or D90.

3. Only thing I know is that when we set project properties starting a Vegas project, there are several that say HD. Does just setting it up like that make it HD? Need very simple answer, if possible!
The project settings pretty much are a suggestion about how you’re going to produce a final project, nothing more. They affect the video preview and some other things, but these can be overridden by your output format (the thing create when you “Render As…”). You can use the Project menu to match your project to the video source (there’s a button for that), which is probably what you want, if you only have input from a single camcorder.

In Vegas 10, when you do select Render As…, you get an “=” indicator next to any rendering preset that matches your project. That’s not always what you want, but it often is. You might render AVC or MPEG-2 in 1080/60i for Blu-ray or AVCHD, use one of the usual DVD Architect MPEG-2 templates for 16:9 DVD to create a video stream for DVD, and then a different AVC output, maybe at 720/30p, for a web upload.

-Dave

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