Additional information – Video acquisition formats
DVCPRO HD
Panasonic have gone another route with their semi professional equipment and introduced their DVCPRO HD which is a versatile tapeless format using intra-frame compression 4:2:2 colour sub sampling and high bitrate of 100Mbps. It down-samples native 720p/1080i signals to a lower resolution. 720p is down-sampled from 1280x720 to 960x720, and 1080i is down-sampled from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080 for 59.94i and 1440x1080 for 50i. Compression ratio is approximately 7:1. DVCPRO HD is usually recorded on Panasonics own flash memory based P2 cards or different third party hard drive solutions. As a format DVCPRO HD is technically superior to HDV. The advantages of DVCPRO HD are relatively low compression rate and a tapeless work flow that in theory can simplify post-production. It is a solid state technology, with no mechanically moving parts, which gives you the advantage that it operates quietly and is in theory maintenance free. The drawback today is that P2 cards have a relatively small capacity at the moment and that the whole technology is still somewhat experimental with regards to work flow, although these difficulties are being ironed out. The tapeless principle also raises questions about preservation and infrastructure, as it means that there isn’t a physical master for the material. Infrastructure for storing the material on servers with sufficient backup processes would be required. Although it is quite certain that the initial hiccups will be ironed out pretty quickly and that it is quite likely that the tapeless paradigm will be the future paradigm for video production, it is still early days to see how things will develop in reality.
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