DVD maker's question on HD

[senderj]

I made many DVDs for home video before. I started from DV cam, then capture via DVRaptor to avi (with Raptor codec), then feed the avi to Premiere for editing, then encode the output with CCE and author DVD with DVD Workshop.

Now after 12 years, my DV cam is approaching its end of life and I am looking for HD video now. I would like to know what briefly is the difference in purchase consideration/workflow etc in the HD age. The HDTV standard here is DMB-TH with MPEG2 or H.264 encoding. Although I do not have any HD equipment now, but certainly I will because the analog TV will terminate in 3 years time. This may be a consideration in compatiblity terms. Now, here is my question:

1. In the DVD age, editing MPEG clips is very difficult, if not impossible. Is this still true now? I saw many new video cam now record in MPEG format on HD or memory. Does it means there are software that can edit this souce as easy as the avi+codec I used to have? Is the latest version of Premiere or VS able to edit MPEG now? What other software can edit this?

2. My PC is a 2.4G + 2G RAM + SATA. It encodes 1 hr avi to mpeg2 in 20 minutes and is marginally acceptable to me. When going to HD, I think I have to upgrade my PC. Any experienced users can should their config and benchmark?

3. I saw an ad on video cam that support both mpeg2 and H.264. But it said mpeg2 is for high quality but short recording time, H.264 is lower quality but longer time. Of course, it is a comparison within the fixed processing power and fixed storage of the cam. I think H.264 is NOT lower in quality by its standard. If processing power is not the bottleneck, H.264 can produce equally good quality as mpeg2 given the same source. Am I right?

4. I think theoritically storage media shouldn't affect the quality of the video. But given the market and cost control consideration, the available products in the market may make a difference. Does anybody compare the video quality of hard disk cam verse flash memory cam? Given same price range, is one better than the other?

[2Bdecided]

1. Software like VideoReDo will edit MPEG without re-encoding. A few NLEs do the same, and call it "smart rendering".

Most recent NLEs accept HDV (MPEG-2 HD @ 25Mbps) these days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software#High_definition_import
The output can be whatever you choose - not necessarily MPEG-2.

2. My P4 2.8GHz is too slow for convenient HDV editing. It's OK for watching.

3. In software encoding, at a given bitrate, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264, e.g. x264) is better than MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. xVid) is better than MPEG-2. In current HD camcorders, the MPEG-2 (HDV) based camcorders have the slight edge in terms of picture quality. AVC is catching up, and still more than good enough for most people - currently it's a pain to edit even on a "fast" machine.

4. It depends on the individual camcorder, and the encoding technology.


I'd strongly suggest starting here:

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/d/Reviews&level_b=Camcorder&level_c=HD.htm#

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Good comments.

When you step up to HD, do be sure to have a _very_ fast PC :)

I would consider a Q6600 processor with 4GB of RAM to be the baseline!

I'm quite impressed with the quality of some HDV cameras, but let's face it, 25mbps CBR MPEG-2 is pretty tight for 1080i60. A really good HDV camera like the Canon XL-H1 can generate very nice images, but it's still held back by MPEG-2 - its HD-SDI output is _fantastic_.

MPEG-2 hardware is much more mature than H.264 hardware. I haven't done extensive comparison between AVCHD cameras (H.264) or HDV cameras. Even though a good H.264 implementation (x264) utterly blows away everything else, most hardware chips are not nearly as good!

Many other cameras can feed uncompressed video out of their HDMI ports, and this can be captured with the BlackMagic Intensity - or any similar HDMI capture card. This combined with ProRes on the Apple camp, or CineForm on the Windows camp can lead to some seriously nice looking video.

If being tethered is not an option, I would go for a hard drive or flash memory based camera. The improvement in download speed to your PC is quite nice :)

Some things to consider:

1) How much money are you prepared to throw at upgrading your PC? You need to get at the very least a very fast Core 2 Duo, preferably a quad.

2) What's your budget for a camera?

3) How do you shoot - out in the field, or in a studio?

~MiSfit