OK, so you got a brand-new HDV camera… and no way (yet) to deliver all of those glorious hi-rez pixels. Blu-Ray, HD DVD, WM9… bah! Who has any of those players?? And the Internet? Unless you’re talking about projects in terms of seconds, rather than minutes or even hours, file sizes and bandwidth will kill ‘ya. So even if someone has sprung big buck$ on a 720p or 1080i HDTV, usually the only way they watch hi-def content is through the cable box or satillite feed. So what’s a shooter to do??

Deliver in SD. “What!”, you exclaim. “Why did I spend all of this money on an HDV camera if I can only deliver SD?!” Here’s why… pixels are your friend. Just because you edit in SD, doesn’t mean that all of that HDV content has to go to waste. Shoot in HDV, capture the HDV files and then edit in your deliverable resolution.

Take the good old SD DVD deliverable… while in your editing bay, find the best 720×480 pixel “window” (for us NTSC folks) out of the massive 1920×1080 (or 1280×720) image you shot. Then, mix it up. Pan… zoom… cut it up into wide shots, masters, close-ups. All of a sudden, your static shot can look like a multi-camera shoot, with nice, smooth camera moves in between. What was a static 3/4 shot of your talent can now have a nice push in, or a close up cut… you get the point.

Here’s my example. OK, it’s not very compelling footage, unless you happen to be my kids’ grandparent or something, and it’s grainy and hand-held. But watch this first30 second clip. I just scaled it down to sort of fit in the DV-sized frame and left it there.

OK. Now check out the next one, where I put about 5 cuts in there, a master shot, close ups, even a pan move. I did this in Premiere Pro in about 3 minutes.

I found that a DV 4:3 ratio frame is about a 45% scale for my 16:9 ratio HDV frame. If I letterboxed the DV into 16:9, I could pull out even further. So a 100% scale is fairly dramatic… as much as doubling the size of your “object” from one cut to the next (never go over 100% in your NLE, by the way, unless you like the look of pixels). I could shoot a two-person interview in a master shot, with both sitting next to each other on a couch… one lighting setup, one take, and then cut between master, close up on each talent, pan between them, slow push or pull… making the static shot much more compelling.

OK, class dismissed. Now get out there and shoot some HDV… and quit moanin’ about deliverables!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 7:57 pm and is filed under cameras, NLE, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.