HDV coming soon!

A recent venture to 'Creative Video' in Warwickshire gave us invaluable insight into the world of High Definition Video. Bringing HDV cameras and edit suites into the Moving Image area would enable students to produce very high quality video which gives stunning results when displayed on compatible screens and projectors.

The format requires a screen or projector with a very high resolution in order to take full advantage of the HDV format, however results show that there is a noticeble improvement on any compatible display. As the cost of hardware is rapidly dropping in price we should be able to take advantage of this in the near future. It's also worth noting than some establishments such as Broadway Cinema will also invest in this technology as it will soon become the industry standard.


Looking more closely at the cameras, we particularly like the Canon XL-H1. At £4750 + vat, it clearly wasn't the cheapest model we looked at, but we liked the quality of the lens and the ability to output fully uncompressed video using the HD-SDI output.

Moving on to the edit suites we wanted to grill the experts about working with Final Cut Pro on the new Power Macs. As hardcore PC users we were a bit unsure about this jump to a new platform, but it has to be said - the performance was impressive.

As a lot of these technologies are still under development we need to make sure that we are investing in hardware that will be supported by major software companies. There does seem to be some conflicts between groups such as Adobe and Apple, let's hope these are resolved by the time we come to purchasing.

Owen