as long as it falls in the HD spec, it shoots HD. in 1920x1024 (that even in HD spec?) it should never be called "1920HD" because the other dimension is used in all other cases (720, 1080, etc). Interlace or progressive doesn't matter. Only difference is that interlace is ~60fps, 1/2 frame per 1/60th of a second & progressive is ~30fps, 1 frame per 1/30th of a second. But they both are still 1 frame in 1/30th second.

Jonathan:

Full HD generally means 1920Hx1080V. To my knowledge 1024 is not used in HD cameras, though 1035 was the original active line count in the NHK HD systems.

One can certainly record an image with any number of pixels in the vertical and horizontal directions and then uprez them to the 1920x1080 standard, but resolution will of course be less than theoretically possible.

One way to view the situation is to say that standard definition is a "1" on a sliding scale and pure HD is "10." On that basis I'd have to say that HDV (1440x1080) delivers a 6. While it pales in comparison with pure HD, it just blows away standard definition stuff so it's a very viable format in my book and a significant improvement. I think one reason why vendors are coining all these new terms is because they are trying to gain leverage against Sony, who beat them to the punch with HDV camera gear. The reports I've seen say that the Sony stuff, while excellent overall, gives a slightly reduced horizontal resolution than what is possible for the HDV format, so the other vendors are trying to hammer that point home with shoppers.

The distinction between 4:2:0 and 4:4:4 is far more subtle to me. From a typical viewing distance, both formats look very similar. The fact that the human visual system is much less sensitive to color detail is one of the fundamental building blocks that made color TV practical back in the early 1950s. There is an obvious advantage to working with full-rez color for things like keying, however.

As for tape, they all record the HDV bitstream with equal fidelity. All that is different is the promise of fewer dropouts, which are fatal to the HDV format.

Finally, I do not receive HD broadcasts so I have no experience with those antennas, but my understanding is that the HD channels are in the UHF band so a UHF antenna is necessary. As long as that criterion is satisfied, you're right: any decent UHF antenna would do a good job with HD.

"full HD" is no longer just a Sony marketing phrase/buzz word. All of the 1080 manufacturers are starting to use it, or something similar. 720 was always considered a stepping stone, not a stopping point in the HD progression, and this terminology is how manufacturers are trying to delineate the differences between 720 and 1080. More importantly, IMO, it's how the display manufacturers *were* trying to delineate displays that could actually display 1080 vs scaling, but that has fallen by the wayside, and now "Full HD" means nothing but that the end product is 1080 at some point, somehow.
Get used to 4:2:0, it's the industry standard for low-cost tools. 4:4:4 is great, but not necessary for most workflows, and eventually (again IMO) 4:4:4 will become as meaningless as 4:2:2 has become in terms of marketing buzz words. 4:2:0 doesn't mean "bad" any more than 4:2:2 guarantees quality.
FWIW, since we're discussing technical terminology, there is no 4:2:2 in HD, it's 22:11:11. :-)

For those buying HD Tapes: Most or all HD footage that can be shot on a DV tape can be shot on any DV tape, and you do not need to buy special tapes that specify "HD Compatibility". Gimic?

Not a gimmick at all. AME II tape has greater oxide saturation, and therefore a stronger carrier signal. Couple that with tremendous error-protection and you've got a recipe for better signal/data reliability.
Better usually costs more. There is no "cheep-good" alternative when it comes to critical data storage, IMO.

For those buying HD Televisions: If you want to pick up those free HD broadcast signals, you do not need a special "HD Ready" antenna. All regular television antennas are capable of receiving HD signals. Gimic?

Yes and No. Currently many stations are broadcasting their signals on two
transmitters. Their analog on channels they have held for decades, and digital
on a temp transmitter until 2009. Usually the digital is a UHF channel. ATSC
data streams can hold 2 HD programs (and with tight compression 1 SD)
or 4 SD programs or a combination of 1 HD and a few SD.
To get the data stream without errors that cause tiling or audio dropouts you
need a solidly mounted antenna. "HD Ready" are usually more solidly
constructed. For example, Blonder Tongue makes professional antennas
for cable companies. They use aluminum tubes for the elements.
Consumer products you see at local electronics or hardware stores are made
from rolled strips that easily get bent in storms.

If you added a UHF antenna to your house, will you get digital on your older
antenna after 2009? If you get the analog now without ghosts or static - yes.
Otherwise you may need to replace it.

NOTE: 2009 is the cutoff year stations HAVE to broadcast analog it does NOT
mean they have to be HD.

I think his reference was to the Antennae not the decoder. All modern good HDTVs have a NTSC (in USA) HD decoder, but older ones or computer monitors like I have need a separate signal decoder, but if you are receiving your signal over the air there is no such thing as an "HD" antennae. You can capture the HD signal with a wire coat hanger.

Jonathan stated you don't need a special "HD READY" antenna. True. Like I said
if you can get the analog broadcast cleanly then you should not have problems
with your old antenna.

Is it advertising hype? Yes and No. A solid antenna, solidly mounted, is
what you might call "HD Ready". We all know a fancy sticker or printing on the
box does not make a specific model better than the one next to it. I would look
inside the box.

If your old antenna moves about in wind......you can guess what you will
experience.

4:4:4 is crucial for those who are shooting chroma key for theatrical use. Those pixels get blown up real good...

4:2:2 is the current delivery standard for Digital Cinema, and it also helps pull good affordable chroma keys for indie productions, as well as of course every network level TV studio.

4:2:0 as we all know looks just fine in a home theater environment, whether SD or HD.

Sony's XDCAM HD 4:2:0 as a capture format has surprised many high level pros with its quality. It turned out to be hard to discern from 4:2:2 in many cases in real life shooting, thanks to intelligent signal processing that cheated reality once more.

HD over the air? I often get a perfect picture in digital when I get snow in analog. With digital it's all or nothing. I live in West L.A. about 45 miles from Mt. Wilson where all the broadcast antennas are located, and I pick up more stations than I care to count with just a foot long table top antenna, a Zenith ZHDTV1 from Amazon.com, which I found to be dramatically better than various other clunkers recommended hither and thither.

...shoot 1920x1024 29.9fps interlaced (as in only 540 actual horizontal lines of video each frame)

Jonathan, please try to use water-based paint for your next weekend remodeling project :O)

I hate interlaced video, but if you consider when the subject is not moving, then obviously you have 1080 horizontal lines of useful information (or to be safe let's say we have 1080 lines going horizontally, so we don't confuse this with "TVL," the so called "TV lines of horizontal resolution" which is calculated number based on video bandwidth).

If the subject is moving, you are moving into the next discussion about temporal resolution vs. spatial resolution, but you still have 1080 lines...

If the camera is shooting 1080i60 (59.97 fields per second), then it's probably using a technique that increases sensitivity and reduces resolution (and interlace flicker)- row-pair summation.

Basically, when it is scanning each field, it scans pairs of rows at once. In the next field, it will shift its scanning up/down one row.

By doing this, the entire sensor is collecting light in each field. This increases sensitivity.

This kind of scanning also reduces resolution and reduces interlace flicker (for people who have HD CRTs... i.e. not many).

The distinction between 4:2:0 and 4:4:4 is far more subtle to me. From a typical viewing distance, both formats look very similar. The fact that the human visual system is much less sensitive to color detail is one of the fundamental building blocks that made color TV practical back in the early 1950s. There is an obvious advantage to working with full-rez color for things like keying, however.
If you have fully saturated red text on a black background, you will likely see some minor loss in image quality. Ditto for yellow on blue, green on magenta, and red on cyan.
*You need a good monitor.

And if the scanning is interlaced, then 4:2:0 in most cases performs inferior to 4:1:1. The short story is because interlace is messed up. Adam Wilt has an article on DV.com that explains this.
[url=http://www.dv.com/columns/columns_item.php?articleId=23902973]

If you'd like another explanation, please ask.

2- Interlaced is messed up.

If you need to rotoscope, you need to de-interlace. And in many apps, the de-interlacing works by throwing away a field (and you lose half your resolution). Good de-interlacers will still sometimes have artifacts.

For compression, interlacing is inefficient.

On the home display side (for non-CRTs), you need to spend money on good de-interlacing to get decent images. This is money that isn't spent on improving the display. (If you can't tell already, I think interlacing is really messed up.)

On the other hand, there are some reasons to go with interlaced broadcast for HD. The main argument is that you get higher resolution, compression will get better, and that eventually de-interlacers will get better.

...and that eventually de-interlacers will get better.

My hope too, however it would seem that most HDTVs actually don't de-interlace at all, well not in the way that I would consider de-interlacing to work. Instead what they attempt to do is emulate an interlaced display via Bobbing. This is all fine and dandy with interlaced footage with as you've noted vertical res limited by line averaging.

But when fed progressive footage with high V res all hell can break loose with bad line twitter. They're supposed to detect that the footage is P but almost all fail miserably and this is not helped much when they also have to cope with mixed I and P sequences.

The best hope I can see for the mess to get sorted is the end of interlaced video but I'm sure not holding my breath for that one.

Bob.

Glenn: Do your comments about row-pair simulation imply "Flicker Reduction" in the camera should be turned off, as it can be with the FX1?

I'm not Glenn but I think I can answer this one.

The Flicker Reduction setting has nothing to do with row-pair sumation. It's purpose is to reduce flicker when shooting 50i with 60Hz lighting or the other way around. That said unless you're facing that lighting challenge probably best to turn it off.

Bob.

Enabling flicker reduction can cause softening of some detail in moving images, and as Bob mentions, if you don't need it, don't use it.
Course' excellent description of various color sampling formats didn't mention that the media coming to your home in most broadcasts, is 4:2:0, as are DVDs, which is one of the smaller benefits of 4:2:0 acquisition. Except at the very higher ends, 4:2:0 as an acquisition format is rapidly becoming the more common format for the reasons Glenn mentioned.

Good point about 4:2:0, just been reading a similar discussion about this elsewhere. We should keep in mind that these numbers are relative to the resolution also. It seems one could well argue that HDV's 4:2:0 delivers better chroma sampling than DVCProHD's 4:2:2 when you factor in what the "4" is relative to.

On the same note, I've made DVDs from both PAL DigiBeta ingested as 4:2:2 and as DV25 at 4:2:0, you gotta look pretty damn hard to see the difference and that's with an expensive DVD player feeding RGB to the TV. I still go the 4:2:2 route mainly because I can, but there's one heck of a lot of guys in PAL land avoiding the expense as neither they nor their clients can pick the difference. Just keep in mind that I'm talking about finalised, graded footage here. Starting from camera tapes and then grading might be a different story.

Bob.

If I'm using regular Sony brand DV tape for HDV and not getting any drop-outs, is there any reason to spend twice as much for the higher grade tape. Yeah it may be better, but if the cheap stuff works perfectly, why spend the money?

Some people do notice problems with 4:2:0 (interlaced) sampling in DVDs.
[url=http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_8_2/dvd-benchmark-special-report-chroma-bug-4-2001.html]

*That article describes two different problems:
1- The interlaced chroma problem. This is inherent to the combination of 4:2:0 and interlaced material.
2- The chroma bug problem. This is a flaw in the DVD player, and not the 4:2:0 scheme (or chroma subsampling).

---
There are a few different 4:2:0 schemes out there, and you sort of get quality hits when you mix and match them.

1- There is the JPEG scheme, where the chroma is reconstructed in blocks. This doesn't look the greatest, why is why JPEG uses 4:4:4 at high bitrates. Some web encoding schemes use this. This scheme takes the least computation.
2a- There is the scheme used in PAL DV, where the chroma is reconstructed by 'blurring' everything in between (linear interpolation). The blurring improves quality.
2b- The same scheme has variations for interlaced and progressive. In the interlaced sampling, the fields are split up, and THEN 4:2:0 is applied to each field.
3a- In DVD/MPEG-2, the chroma is reconstructed with blurring horizontally. This goes hand in hand with 4:2:2, since 4:2:2 does this. Vertically however, everything is reconstructed with blocks. This is likely a performance thing.
3b- And of course, there are versions for interlaced and progressive.

And at the same time, a lot of codecs will reconstruct the chroma inappropriately... reconstructing everything in blocks instead of blurring it out. By doing this, the chroma is shifted 0.5 pixels over and it doesn't look as good as it could. But this is extremely subtle.

If your delivery is 4:2:0 interlaced, then those artifacts will overshadow your problem. And even then, 4:2:0 artifacts are objectionable only in rare situations AND you need a good, large monitor to see 'em. It can happen when you are generating red/green/blue text in an NLE (especially on a background of the opposite color). When shooting the real world, you might see it crop up when shooting concerts with very saturated lights or if the art direction has a lot of very saturated colors.

4- On the other hand, you can shoot on something like a Z1 (4:2:0 interlaced HDV) with a 35mm adapter and the footage looks much better than it should. 90% of the time it can look like Varicam footage.

5- Sorry, I don't know the z1 menus well at all.

If I'm using regular Sony brand DV tape for HDV and not getting any drop-outs, is there any reason to spend twice as much for the higher grade tape. Yeah it may be better, but if the cheap stuff works perfectly, why spend the money?

Probability theory. Your tape is unlikely to get a dropout. Expensive HDV tape is highly unlikely to get a dropout.

"Expensive HDV tape is highly unlikely to get a dropout."

Says who? The people who want to sell you the more expensive tape.

"Says who? The people who want to sell you the more expensive tape."

Oh, thank goodness, now I don't feel so bad about using Walmart-brand HDV tape. (All my other shooter buddies just thought I was cheap!)

John

> but if the cheap stuff works perfectly, why spend the money?

It's the same reason you would shoot DVCAM instead of DV and get only 20 minutes on a 60 minute tape. Insurance! If you have ever had a drop-out with an HDV camera you'll know that it isn't fun to try and recover from 15 lost frames (that's 1/2 second!) in the middle of someone's acceptance speech. (trust me... it's very, very, noticeable and embarrassing for you. Shoot a lot of B-roll of the crowd for extra insurance ;-))

So you have to ask yourself, how important is what I'm shooting. If it is a once in a lifetime event, I would use the best tape possible. You are going to pass the expense on to the customer anyway so why play around.

I shoot all of my home videos on inexpensive Sony DV tape and so far it's worked out fine. I shoot all of my work projects on more expensive HDV tape. When you know there is a potential of a 1/2 second drop-out you take all the precautions you can. For just foolin' around, regular DV tape will do. It's up to you. Both work. One just works a little better.

~jr

I second what you just said.

I've lost frames in a continuous running speech that the end user did NOT want fill material in.

There is no way to get around the dropped frames at that point. You just suck it up and move on and tell him you are sorry it happened and take a pay cut for it.

From my experience most 'tape' problems are more likely to be camera problems. Get a head gummed up and you're in serious trouble no matter what tape you use, shooting DV or HDV.

I've managed to repair serious dropouts in vital footage by cutting out the bad bit and time stretching vision from either side in Vegas. The A/V sync loss over a few seconds is too brief for anyone to notice. What you cannot fix is loosing audio, my suggestion is if cannot run a second camera that's recording the same audio is to get a cheap audio recorder and double head record. You can easily enough patch in a second ot two of audio from your backup source and fudge the vision.

Bob.