Formats Explained

HDCAM SR

HDCAM SR offers the very best picture quality and has been developed to accommodate the most demanding production applications with its ultra-mild signal compression. HDCAM SR is used for movies and commercials, sophisticated green screen effects, digital intermediates, telecine transfers and archiving. It delivers breathtakingly natural, detailed pictures while significantly driving down production costs.

D5 HD

Panasonics HD D5 uses standard D5 video tape cassettes to record HD material, using an intra-frame compression with a 4:1 ratio. It is also able to hold eight audio channels sampled at 48 kHz. HD D5 is often used for capturing film projects for post production whereby the HD D5 scanning equipment is cheaper by the hour than a full resolution 2K film scan (which cannot be stored on videotape).

HDCAM

HDCAM offers superb High Definition picture performance, whether you prefer to post produce in HDCAM or down convert for editing within existing SD infrastructures, HDCAM offers greater flexibility to match your creative preferences and production needs. Shoot at 25P to give your television productions a prestige, ‘filmic’ look. Alternatively, select 50i or 60i for a more immediate feel, especially with fast-moving action – the choice is yours.

XDCAM HD

Positioned between HDV and HDCAM in terms of picture quality, features and price, XDCAM HD builds on the XDCAM system that has already transformed work flow efficiency in the Standard Definition world.XDCAM HD records High Definition pictures onto a rugged, removable optical disc. MPEG Long GOP encoding ensures crisp, clear picture quality with true 1080-line resolution. The recording data rate is selectable between 35Mbps, 25Mbps and 18Mbps, allowing picture quality and recording time to be selected in response to the demands of each specific project.

Digibeta

Digibeta has been the industry standard for some time now. The Digital Betacam format records a compressed component video signal at plus 4 channels of uncompressed 48 kHz audio. A 5th audio track is available for cueing, and a linear timecode track is also used on the tape. Digital Betacam is considered to be the gold standard of formats for standard-definition digital video, is capable of outperforming cheaper digital formats such as DVCAM and DVCPRO, and associated equipment is comparatively expensive. Panasonic offers the DVCPRO50 competing format, which has similar technical abilities.

DVCPRO

Panasonic’s DVCPRO 25 has an even greater track width than DVCam and uses another tape type (Metal Particle instead of Metal Evaporated). Additionally, the tape has a longitudinal analog audio cue track. Audio is only available in the 16 bit/48 kHz variant. Apart from that, DVCPRO25 is otherwise identical to DV. DVCPRO50 doubles the coded video bitrate from 25 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s, and improves color-sampling resolution the resulting picture-quality is reputed to rival Digital Betacam, a more expensive studio format.DVCPRO HD, also known as DVCPRO100, uses four parallel codecs and a coded video bitrate of 100 Mbit/s. Despite HD in its name, DVCPROHD downsamples native 720p/1080i signals to a lower resolution. Compression ratio is approximately 7:1.

DVCAM

DvCam is very similar to Mini DV but DVCAM tape runs faster and the tape heads record the data onto a physically wider track on the tape. The effect of this is that the same data is spread across a larger tape area and therefore a higher number of magnetic particles within the tape. This helps to reduce errors caused by drop-out which can be induced by minor tape imperfections.

HDV

Offering an ideal migration path from DVCAM to entry-level HD production, HDV records pictures at 1080 line resolution onto a standard DV format cassette. As well as reducing camcorder size and weight, use of this smaller cassette size cuts media costs. It also allows dual-format HDV/DVCAM recording and playback with the same camcorder or VTR editing deck - reducing hardware inventory requirements, storage and transportation costs. Furthermore, it's easy to incorporate HDV material into the HDCAM world via an external converter.

MiniDV

MiniDV is a format that uses tiny tape cassettes, storing DV-format video in digital form on a magnetic tape. DV provides a quality digital picture at a low price.