Amen.
HDV is going to do to DV what DV did to desktop video. This is going to be an exceptionally fun NAB, I think.

Spot ,you worked with any generated text with the new monitor yet ?

If so , how does it hold up ?

Doing that just now. It is SHARP! I'm subtitling one of the new training DVD's. Illegal colors immediately are visible too, I don't even need the scopes to see them. (well...OK, the less obvious ones can't be seen, but it's pretty clear when the whites are over the top.

Spot,

I asked my friend the Sony Dealer about HDV and got a curled lip response. He said with HD being 100 mps and HDV being 25 mps, HDV will be more consumer HDTV, being slightly better than VHS quality. I do not claim to be a technical expert so I am asking for your cut on this. Jina's contract my require the occasional HDTV piece so I'm wondering if we would be able to keep the money in the family by investing in an HDV camcorder that can also serve as feeder/recorder in the same manner as, say, a Canon GL2/XL1s.

Peter & Jina
Snow White Productions in Northern Alberta (web page down due to ISP going bankrupt)

I don't know the technical answers, but describing HDV as "slightly better than VHS" is, to put it mildly, something of an understatement.

Consider this:
SvHS is better than VHS
DV is better than SVHS
HDV is better than DV

How then is HDV "slightly better than VHS" ?

From what I've read, HDV will keep me happy for years!

We have one with the SDI option card in it but I'm curious as to how you get HD into it.
Also do you find 14" is large enough to see the fine detail?
I believe you can also get a firewire card for it except you'd buy a full f/wire to RGB converter for half the price.

Having watched HD TV for four months now both live shows and filmed,
and having rendered slides and WMV test files to HDV specs and viewed on the same Sony KV-34HS510 tube TV I can safely say that there is no difference in quality between what is broadcast on the networks and the "HDV" quality as rendered from Vegas. It is stupendous in quality. Leave "HD" for the movie studios and the rich people as the differences are minimal. Full HD is an absolute waste of time and money. The colors and resolution are almost undistinguishable between what is actually broadcast and HDV and in most cases the HDV is better. HDV is so far ahead in quality from DV there is no comparison. Now if they make a decent camera---

JJK

The camera is the tricky bit, it's not just the res of the CCDs and being able to write so much more data to something but the optics to match.
I'd agree that mostly it's hard to pick the difference from increases in color depth but I wonder how much of that is due to the display devices. I've seen the very best cinema video projection system straight from a DI master, well it looked BETTER than anything I've seen off a 35mm print but the experts were still saying come back when it's at 8K res.
The other issue I suspect is that even if the display device can produce enough contrast ratio to benefit from the extra depth, unless you're watching it in a darkened room you'll loose it anyway.
That's the biggest problem I have with HD of any variant. Fot 90% of how the public watch TV its a plain waste. Whose going to run into a special room to watch the news or whatever. Now OK it'd be worth it for a movie BUT the going price for the broadcast rights for a movie in HD has been jacked up so high I wonder how many are going to be broadcast anyway.

Just my two bobs worth.

Your dealer has shown the same idiocy that I showed when I first got the JVC in hand. Once I had a week with it, I was blown away for the combination of price and quality. True, it's a pretty bottom end camera, but lit right and handled right, it looks incredible. It is to VHS what a Mercedes is to a Pinto. If your dealer has ever touched the footage, he should know better.
HDV will be the future for a while, mark mywords.

-Holy Smoke- Might be the only overstatement here.. ;-)
This is truly an exciting developement....
W

Any good sites to learn more about HDV?

There is one on the COW and DMN but its so new that there is very
little to talk about. www.digitalconnection.com has a good layman's write-up on cable, satellite, and over the air HD. There are other forums but they are pretty terrible. All advertizing and no info. (The Sony Vegas forum basically blows everybody away for info) HD tuners run from $400.00 to $3000.00. And that does not include the TV set.
Cineform.com has some info also in the discussion forum and also about their new HDV codec. There are some people on this forum that
know as much as anybody and I am not one of them. Microsoft has WMV-HD test files for download to demonstrate the quality which is excellent. I have three HD tuners and the easiest one to operate and
gives excellent performance is the MY-HD 2 tuner card $399.00 with remote control and instant recording to hard drive or D-VHS tape over
firewire. The Samsung tuner does not have brightness, color saturation, or contrast adjustments and costs $200.00 more. The first Samsung I had toasted itself. One of the problems with broadcasting(receiving) HD over the air is the brightness sometimes is darker on the digital channel as the color saturation and contrast. So if you have no adjustments on your HD tuner you have to go back and forth between the TV set and the tuner. This is only for the digital channels and not the analog so if you set the digitals correctly the analog channels will be to bright. Also the Samsung has distorted analog channels that cause regular people to look fat and is not correctable. The Samsung tuner is in my opinion unacceptable. The MY-HD2 people have really done their homework. If you have the Cineform "Connect HD" codec ($499.00) you can render lets say slides or pictures in Vegas (2k X 2k pictures) and export them to tape
(D-VHS) and be totally blown away at the quality. You can also render the WMV files from Microsoft and I garuntee you will be stoked.

JJK

Well, thanks Spot and the rest of you. What make and model camcorder should we look at? We were thinking of getting a D50/DSR-1 combo in case they can't live without BetaSP or SX down the road but it sounds like we're better off putting the money in our boy's education fund and embracing HDV for much less outlay.

Peter

Spot said, "Your dealer has shown the same idiocy that I showed when I first got the JVC in hand. Once I had a week with it, I was blown away for the combination of price and quality. True, it's a pretty bottom end camera, but lit right and handled right, it looks incredible. It is to VHS what a Mercedes is to a Pinto. If your dealer has ever touched the footage, he should know better.
HDV will be the future for a while, mark mywords. "

Which JVC are you referring to? The GR-HD1? I hope so because I have a chance to pick one up pretty cheap.