HDV is DEAD!

Many years ago in a standard definition world tapes ruled and media professionals on a budget were forced to wrangle with an evil which has been dubbed HDV.  That archaic world had to make all media fit in an overbearing limitation of 25 megabits per second and everyone suffered for it.  Those who were hungry for the future spoke of something called, HD.

Engineers worked tirelessly to make HD possible in that land of limits called DV tape.  Their magic held and HDV was born.  It promised a new era where all could take the path to HD.  But something went wrong and the color went out of the world.  HDV was compressing the life out of our colors.  And the computational power of our machines was being drained.  The 15 GOP (Group Of Pictures) compression was demanding power and editing was at a stand still.  We paid dearly for our premature thirst for HD.

Those who saw the light escaped into a world of tape-less media.  I’m told they no longer have computer video captures and data is native from lens to screen.  How many generations must pass before our video is poor enough for HDV to be eradicated!  I promise you if you are still infected with HDV, there is a cure!

You can find freedom and life in the new SOLID STATE!

All joking aside, you really need to abandon HDV as a format.  It was MPEG-2 and incredibly lacking in color depth.  It was made to get HD resolutions to fit into the 25 megabits per second tape speeds of DV tapes.  Solid state media such as SD cards and P2 media freed video from that limitation.  Tape based video also required a video capture to get the media from the tape to the computer.  That process cost a generation of quality (although digital got around that) and required you to sit through that capture (for a two hour event recording from three cameras you could expect to spend at least six hours capturing).

HDV was great for about two years and then it was obvious that better technologies had come along.  I’m shocked at how many groups are still using HDV.  It is a terrible format for today.  Because of the heavy compression inherent in HDV, editing the content is far more processor intensive than HD video editing needs to be.

I just wanted to let you know that there is a much better world out there in video.