Is the SD video production market dead?

[Mike Cohen]

The answer to your question is, “What does your customer need?”
and “Who are your customers?”

Everything we deliver is SD, either DVD, CD-ROM or Flash Video.
It is still a pretty low bandwidth world. We may have Cable or DSL at home and the office with great bandwidth, but corporate networks vary from low bandwidth with Flash player 9 to much better. You need to sell to the lowest common denominator in your marketplace.

If you make national TV commercials, you have a much different paradigm than if you do corporate video. And quite honestly, there is a lot of corporate video work out there.

We shoot about 80% HDV. The main reason we use the HDV camera so much is because it is a much better camera, but the better image quality is a nice bonus. We don’t always edit in HDV, especially when mixing with SD sources. Our 20+ year video library is all on DVCPRO 25.

We receive about 200 videos a year produced by others, and about 199 of them this year were SD DVD or DVCAM.

SD is dead…long live SD.

Mike Cohen

[Scott Sheriff]

I shoot everything in HD 16×9, and deliver in 16×9 SD DVD. SD is very much alive. 4×3 is whats dead.