HD For Indies

If you'd like to be informed when the DVDs are available, send an email to mike AT hdforindies DOT com with "Shootout DVD" in the subject.

At the DGA's Digital Day today I mentioned the DVDs I'm working on - for those who are just now tuning in, here's the deal:

Earlier this year, we (Mike Curtis (me), Chris Hurd of DVInfo.net, and Adam Wilt of DV.com, and others) gathered six cameras:

Sony HVR-Z1U (HDV 1080i format)
JVC GY-HD100U (HDV 720p format)
Panasonic HVX200 (DVCPROHD format on P2 cards)
Canon XL H1 (HDV 1080i format)

as well as:
Sony F350 (new XDCAM HD format)
Panasonic Varicam/H (DVCPRO HD format)
(we'd planned a Sony F900, but that fell through)

We shot a wide range of test material - indoors, outdoors, static, panning, fast motion, 24p, 60i (some 50i too), charts, actresses, greenscreen, outdoors by a lake, etc.

All cameras were recorded to their native media, and when in studio, also uncompressed to disc (via HD-SDI or component analog to HD-SDI via converters) to RAIDs with AJA and BlackMagic HD-SDI capture cards.

There are something like 60 shots captured on all cameras - for charts and critical static tests, we rotated the cameras off the same set of sticks to match shooting positions, but for a lot of the action footage we lined them all up as closely as possible to get simultaneous footage (slated for sync).

I've spent a large amount of time capturing all the footage, converting/removing pulldown, uprezzing, etc. so all footage will be 10 bit uncompressed 1920x1080 @ 23.976 fps or 59.94 interlaced fields/sec (even if it started at another size or framerate).

The goal is to have comparisons, commentary, etc. for all of these available as both standard and high definition DVDs (high def DVDs will be for Mac playback only most likely, as I tend to focus more on Final Cut Pro than Avid).

It's 1am, more details to follow, but for those who attended DGA Digital Day, I wanted to let you know what's up.


-mike