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Originally Posted by drbill
Hi Perrone Ford!
My understanding is that miniDV is not stored in a compressed format, but HDV is (using MPEG-2, AVHCD or other compression algorithms). I agree that these are lossy and multiple decompressions/recompressions can result in much poorer image quality. My first video editor (a Casablanca) used MPEG-2 and I could see the loss in just one cycle. The fact that HDV uses these compression algorithms greatly concerns me as the advantage of the higher resolution of HDV is going to be compromised IF one does a lot of editing and archiving of the edited (vs raw) footage. Most of us do that.
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Bill: I dont think you will regret going to HDV -- way way better than "SD" stuff on MiniDV tapes despite the compression.
Final Cut Pro can edit the HDV natively, but I am not sure how well that works due to the GOP needing to be changed if you cut the footage.
I am using final cut express 3.0 which translates HDV into Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) for editing (I *think* this is something a bit like a series of intra-frame compressed JPEG ?) Editing is fas and the quality is much better than SD.
I think Final Cut Pro has some other excellent options (DVCPro?) for editing also.
The main things I noticed with HDV even when downrezzing to DVD is:
1) It just looks much cleaner than DV
2) You can play with the footage a lot more before it starts to degrade (to fix colors/brightness/contrast etc.)
I too was hesitant regarding the high-level of compression, and I do think that HDV and AVCHD are just intermediate phases that will hopefully die out at some point soon, but if you want an Underwater cam today, then for most of us it's HDV or AVCHD