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High Definition: Are we there yet?
Written by Michael Kolowich - DigiNovations   
Friday, 23 January 2009 05:47

We’ve been using high-definition video cameras for just over a year now, and have recently been producing some finished productions in high-definition. And projected on the wall from our Sony Cineza projector, the results really do take your breath away. Whenever I see something we’ve produced in high-definition, it’s clear I’m seeing the future.

But is high-definition ready for the present? How do you decide whether and when to make the switch from the familiar resolution of the standard-definition image?

Fortunately, the choices have become dramatically simpler over the last year for professional marketers, due to some developments over the last year. Here’s what’s changed:

First, the introduction of a new high-definition video format — HDV — has virtually eliminated the cost premium involved in capturing high-definition images. Sony led the way in November, 2004, by introducing its HVR-Z1U professional HDV camcorder at the shocking price of US $4,900 — stunning a market which was accustomed to paying between $40,000 and $200,000 for high-definition cameras. Yes, HDV’s video compression may offend the sensibilities of compression-resistent purists, but we and our clients have been very impressed with the high-definition pictures from these cameras.

Second, it’s now becoming practical to edit high-definition video. Video production has always asked a lot of the PC’s it’s edited on, and HDV raises those demands even more. But Moore’s Law has been giving us more powerful editing platforms every year, and late last year, the video editing software companies started supporting native HD and HDV editing capability in their software (we use Adobe Production Studio at DigiNovations). HD editing does take a bit longer to edit because of increased rendering times and few extra steps, but we’re finding about a 25-30% production cost premium for HDV over SD, rather than a doubling or tripling of production costs that was prevalent until this past year.

Finally, there are now emerging — very slowly — ways to show the high-definition results. HD screens and projectors are the easy part, but there are now affordable tape decks that will play HDV to fill those screens. The bad news is that a high-definition DVD format is stuck in a format war that makes the VHS-Betamax wars of the 80’s look like a backyard game of cowboys and indians. This, more than anything else, is holding HD back from the corporate production market.

So what’s our advice?
First, companies and organizations should start accumulating video assets in high-definition format — probably HDV. These assets can always be used today in standard-definition productions by "down-converting" the high-definition picture to 720x480 size, but they’ll be available in the higher-resolution format when that becomes the prevalent distribution mode a few years from now.

Second, companies should be open to producing in high-definition in situations where they control the presentation, such as in a trade-show booth, major event, or welcome center. In this situation, it’s easy to get an HDV tape deck to play the video on-screen, and the DVD format wars become irrelevant.

Third, for any project that has a shelf life of more than 2 years, you should talk to your production company about how to build a project so that it can be distributed today in standard definition, yet converted (with a few days effort) to high-definition later on.
The bottom line is that, through the new HDV format, high-definition video is now within reach for most organizations, and should become part of the thinking and conversation for any video project.

At DigiNovations, we’ve devoted major attention to this, to the point where we’ve replaced all our standard definition cameras with cameras that record in both HDV and SD, and we’re upgrading all of our editing workstations to handle HDV. High-definition is here to stay, is now very affordable, and will break loose as soon as the dust begins to settle on the format warriors’ travails.