High Definition Video Production

High Definition Video production is the art and service of producing a finished video product to a customer's requirement and consumption, on a High Definition format. High Definition formats are normally either interlaced 1080 line video with a frame rate of 30 frame/s, or 720 line video, progressively scanned, with a frame rate of 60 frame/s. However, there are variants that exceed these standards.

Formats

The following digital tape formats are commonly used for HD Video Production:

* HDCAM. The Sony HDCAM format supports 1080 resolutions at frame rates of 24p, 25p, 50i, and 60i. HDCAM stores the video at 1440 x 1080, which is a 33 percent reduction horizontally from 1920. It also uses a unique color sampling of 17:6:6, which means that HDCAM has only half the color detail of other HD formats. HDCAM is 4.4:1 compressed and is 8-bit, but supports 10-bit input and output.

* D5-HD. The Panasonic D5-HD format uses the D5 tape shell. Unlike HDCAM, D5-HD can do 720/60p, 1080/24p, 1080/60i, and even 1080/30p. D5-HD compresses at 4:1 in 8-bit mode and 5:1 in 10-bit mode, and supports 8 channels of audio.

* DVCPRO-HD. This Panasonic HD format, sometimes called D7-HD, is based on the same tape shell used for DVCAM and DVCPRO. D7-HD does 720/60p and 1080/60i, with 1080/24p in development. It uses 6.7:1 compression, and supports 10-bit input and output per channel. DVCPRO-HD supports 8 channels of audio.

* HDV. This format is one of a number of emerging formats that are being used in lower-cost cameras. HDV was introduced with JVC's groundbreaking professional consumer (prosumer) HD camera, the JY-HD10, which records highly compressed MPEG-2 on a mini DV tape. HDV is an MPEG-2 transport stream that includes a lot of error correction. Its video uses interframe-compressed MPEG-2, at 19 megabits per second (Mbit/s) for 720p and 25 Mbit/s for 1080i. Audio is encoded with 384 kbit/s MPEG-1 Layer 2 stereo. The interframe encoding enables HDV to achieve good quality video at lower bit rates, which means much more content per tape, but it increases the difficultly of editing the content. The next article in this series will provide additional details about interframe encoding.

Future

With the increasing use of video in a wide range of commercial and government functions, and the increased access modern customers have to viewing video on a range of new devices, video production is a fast growing industry, and High Definition is now becoming the de facto standard in the Production industry.

See also

*Perspective Video