HD For Indies

Cinema Minima continues to post great coverage of Sundance, check it all out.

It seems there's a problem with my HDV workflow - it works for FILES imported into iMovieHD, but NOT for video captured into iMovieHD when dealing with 1080i Sony HDV footage. Not having a camera myself, I can't test it.

Apple has released iMovieHD 5.01, which Apple claims resolves some timing issues with audio/video syncronization.

-had a long technical email conversation with a smart geeky guy (and I mean that in the best possible way) who said that HDCAM cameras (Sony F900) basically just have two DV chips in there for sensors, and that's why HDCAM format only records 1440 pixels wide - two times DV's 720 pixels wide=1440. What about vertical resolution? I didn't get an answer that I fully understood, but he was implying that it isn't all that great. Along those lines, the reason why DVCPRO HD is 960x720 pixels is because the CCD sensors in the Varicam cameras are that size - two standard def CCDs (720x480) stood up sideways on their ends (720 tall now) and set side by side (960 wide from 2x480). Disheartening - both Sony and Panasonic go to great lengths to make us think otherwise.

UPDATE But I keep hearing conflictin info in that, so I'm not sure. The CODEC on both of thse is actually lower res (1440 not 1920 on HDCAM, 960 not 1280 on Varicam), so I dunno. yet another source said they were working with the systemand needed to know the resoloution of the CCDs for some code, and it was in fact 1920x1080. So looks like I had it wrong.

Graeme pointed out that the CCDs on the Panavised HDCAM are

CCDwidth 9.59mm
CCDheight 5.39mm

two 4:3 chips glued together wouldn't give you that shape or size.



-mike