Many Independent Filmmakers out there have heard the gospel from the HD tape manufacturers touting full filmmaking capabilities off of Sony’s HDV Format, or Panasonic’s DVCPRO HD.

Of course, many of the cameras give you the ability to throw on nice lenses and with the right professional lighting, you get some beautiful pictures. Where it gets disrupted, though, is Post Production.

Pixel Stretching

Shooting to DVCPRO HD, HDCAM, or HDV captures the picture in an anamorphic format. What that means, is that it squeezes an HD picture into a more squarish format.  Later in post, when you play it back it becomes un-squeezed on-the-fly.

For example, DVCPRO HD captures an HDTV 1920×1080p picture as 1280×1080. This is a loss of 33% of the picture! In other words, in post, the picture has to be stretched 33% to get it out to an HD Monitor.  HDCam and HDV sacrifice more color sampling to capture at a higher 1440×1080 pixels, which still needs to be stretched 25% to get to 1920×1080.

What does this stretching mean if you have text, or fine details?  It means they get stretched and pulled, and become muddy in the process. This also makes green or blue screens nearly impossible to actually pull-off, and the noise in the blue channel is particularly horrible.

Formats to Use

If working with tape is absolutely necessary, Sony’s HDCam SR format and Panasonic’s D5 format both capture 10-bit color at the full 1920×1080 frame size. The HDCam SR format can capture 4:4:4 RGB recording, while the Panasonic’s D5 can capture 4:2:2 Component recording. If the final output is meant to go to film, the HDCam SR format gives the best results, while if the final format is just going to HDTV, Panasonic’s D5 format is totally fine for mastering.

From our testing here at Bling, shooting directly to HD Cam SR at 2x mode with a video bitrate of 880 Mbit/s,  shooting uncompressed capture directly to an AJA or Blackmagic Capture Card over dual-link HD-SDI, or RED RC36 Digital Files gave the best results. The key is to try to skip the HDV or DVCPro HD compression process. You should try to avoid working with these codecs at any point in the online process, if possible, to get the best possible quality picture for Visual FX, Film Projection, or actual 35mm Film-out.