DVCAM vs. HDV

I have been asked this question countless times since I began this project. Are you shooting HD? The answer is no. This is mainly because I can’t afford the $150,000 for the VariCam or CineAlta technologies. Next comes. “What about HDV?” I didn’t go HDV for several reasons which I will now explain.

I made my decision based on where the technology was just over a year ago and through somewhat thorough tests. The Sony HSR FX1 was the camera that had everyone very excited. My first issues with this are that Sony claimed a 1440x 1080 resolution which I didn’t really see (I would say more like 960x1080) . The green pixels get offset halfway between Blue and Red which apparently gives you more resolution. Next, the lens is in fact better than my Sony DSR-PD150, but the precision it would take to deliver its optical resolving power does not exist in me.

For those who don’t know. HDV is highly compressed using the MPEG-2 codec – meaning your 190Megabytes a second uncompressed gets compressed to 3.16 Megabytes per second. DVCAM is 3.6 Megabytes per second. The audio is compressed using MPEG-1 technology. I do not like the fact that the audio would be compressed. If you record separate audio with a DAT recorder, this will not be an issue.

One fact that really turned me off of this camera is that it has a group of pictures (GOP) size of 15 through the MPEG-2 transport stream. This basically means that every 15th frame is a full update of the entire frame, and the next 15 essentially just record changes from the previous frame. This is frightening because if you drop a frame, or lose a frame, you could potentially lose half a second of video. Too chancy for me.

Bottom line for me: When I look at a 720x480 frame from the HDV footage and compare it to the same from my DVCAM, the HDV simply looks like poor quality consumer footage. I have also heard complaints about artifacts appearing when colour correction is applied to HDV. I also noticed some noise in the picture – albeit very fine noise, but noise just the same.

There were some other issues, but all in all, I have to say that I prefer the DVCAM footage in its dynamics in post and quality of the RAW images captured. I will say that there is more resolution in HDV – unarguably – but since there was a lot of handheld and some action in the film, I couldn’t excuse the fact that HDV gave A LOT of motion artifacts at the pixel level.

“But Jordan, what about the HD universe of channels?” Again, if I could afford $150,000 for a camera I would be using it for everything. However, a little known fact that is not advertised by the marketing campaigns for HDV is that HD channels will only accept programming with no more than 20% HDV footage.

So in long – my decision was made from the prosumer level. I would rather have footage that has the possibility of looking like good prosumer footage (DVCAM) than good consumer footage (HDV). Plus, I already owned the DVCAM technology and had used it successfully with ‘Bangkok Girl’.

As with all my ‘technical’ blogs; this is very subjective and I am sure that others will have different opinions and experiences with these cameras.