This is how most of our clients are using the Z1 at the moment, to be honest apart from those who need to shoot in low light or are halfway through a project the demand for SD cameras is just non existant.
I've noticed a big difference between how the A1/C1 and the Z1 handle getting too much motion to cope with. On the Z1 things just get real ugly very quickly, the A1 seems to drop resolution/ add blur to make the job easier for the encoder. If what I think I'm seeing is really happening then for those who haven't grasped the basics of shooting HDV the A1 seems a safer choice.
Bob.

So really there is no reason to ever shoot in SD mode then. If you want to work totally in SD mode, just capture SD from the HDV footage!

As far as the difference between the Z1 and H1 with too much information, maybe this is because the H1drops a little resolution for the EIS.

Not only does the HC1 drop a little resolution, but the CMOS also blurs/interpolates, and it seems to do a really great job, based on the short time that I had the cam.

> So really there is no reason to ever shoot in SD mode then.

One valid reason is if you are shooting for someone who expects you to deliver a miniDV tape with DV on it. Likewise if you are shooting with other cameras that are SD and you don’t want the HDV to stand out (because it will even when down converted, it looks that much better!). I have not shot a lot of motion with my Z1 yet to see how it handles it and if shooting in SD mode under those conditions would yield a more usable picture.

Other than that, I think always shooting HDV is the best way to use these cameras. You then have the option of downconverting to DV Widescreen, or capturing as HDV. It’s the same 63 minute miniDV tape either way so why record SD? It doesn’t make sense.

~jr

I must say I really love this camera.

You then have the option of downconverting to DV Widescreen, or capturing as HDV

If you want to create SD 4:3, would you still capture HDV?

> If you want to create SD 4:3, would you still capture HDV?

It depends on the quality you want/need. The downconverted DV Widescreen looks better than SD buts it still converts the 4:2:0 HDV to 4:1:1 DV. If you capture HDV you will be working in Vegas with 4:2:0 color information which is better for color correcting, chromakey, etc. Then if you render to 4:2:0 SD MPEG2 DVD as your final format you loose nothing in color quality because you didn’t resample the video to 4:1:1 at all like when you downconvert.

It does take 5x longer to render to MPEG2 from M2T files on my P4 3.0Ghz PC. (not to mention the render time up front of making proxies so I can work with the video in the first place) so when I capture downconverted DV Widescreen, I know I’m trading off some quality for speed. Bottom line: capturing HDV will definitely give you a better result even if SD is your final target. Only you can decide if the improved quality is worth the rendering time involved and I bet that will change from project to project.

~jr

One thing I'm just itching to try someday is to shoot HDV, use DeShaker to stabilize the hand-held stuff, and then bring it into DV. In this way I should be able to get stabilized DV footage just as sharp as raw DV that hasn't been stabilized (this is my only gripe about DeShaker--it softens the footage just a bit).

If you do this, Riredale, be sure to leave the image stabilizer off in the cam, because that too, will soften the image just a tad, depending on the cam. You'll particularly notice it with fine lines. We just shot a promo piece for an amusement park, and the fine lines of the roller coaster rail turned soft on the edges, as they were really contrasted to the white safety guard beneath them.

Another reason for capturing HDV for 4:3 SD output:

If you down convert you will get the middle part of the 16:9 frame throughout, which may be fine if you shot everything perfectly, but cropping from 1440 x 1080 to 720 x 576 (or 480) gives you a constant opportunity to reframe IF (perish the thought ..) you didn't get it quite right first time.

Huh. Spot, I wonder why it would do that? I never would have thought that an optical stabilization system would soften the image. I'm assuming here that the Sony HDV cameras do optical stabilization.

> If you down convert you will get the middle part of the 16:9 frame throughout

Actually, the Sony HVR-Z1U has three options for how to handle this. You can select Squeeze, Letterbox, or Edge Crop. I use Squeeze when I downconvert and set my Vegas project to DV Widescreen so I have total control over the cropping if I wanted to convert it to 4:3 (but I’ve been leave it widescreen).

> which may be fine if you shot everything perfectly

The Z1 also has 4:3 markers on the LCD so if you know you need to provide both 16:9 and 4:3 content from the same shoot, you can compose for it easily.

~jr

Thanks Johnny,

I was more referring to the advantage of keeping HDV resolution so that cropping and resizing within the frame would not result in lower quality for SD. If you start with 720 x 480 then select smaller parts of the frame there may be some loss.