HDV via HDMI

On the drive into the office this morning I was listening to the Pixelcorps's This Week in Media podcast (this is an excellent podcast to get you fill for many things production related.) The first segment of Episode 42 (March 4th, 2007) discusses the advantages of HDMI out from inexpensive HDV cameras (like the excellent Sony V1U and the upcoming Canon HV20.) They were discussing their recent experiments with Sony V1, although they quote nearly every spec. wrong (such as HDV compression is 4:2:0 not 4:1:1 and the V1 has three 960x1080 sensors not 1440x1080 like the Canon XL-H1), but none of the specs matter for their findings. These guys were judging the results on the HDMI output versus the tape compressed HDV signal, and discovered how much better the live HDMI (4:2:2) feed is for color correction and keying etc. Take a listen.

Now for the plug : for those with a Blackmagic Intensity HDMI card, what this podcast describes is much easier to do with all of the CineForm tools (which added HDMI support,) capturing live 4:2:2 directly in a CineForm AVI, without have to deal with the bandwidth of uncompressed. The other thing the podcast got wrong was that only Sony Vegas can handle the 24p data from the V1U, again all the CineForm tools supported that the camera 24p format the day the camera shipped. So whether you shoot to tape / disk based HDV or live HDMI capture, we've been ready for a while (see the recent press release for more details.) If only those Pixelcorps guys would add some more PCs to their productions tools.