There's a whole lot of reasons to wait a while. Some people may disagree, but to each his own. For starters, some of these newer "so called" HD cams that are cheeper (not the HC1), are recording MPEG4 at pretty compressed rates. So, yeah, you have the resolution, but what's the point if you compress the hell out of it. Secondly, the "better" consumer HD cams (Sony at the moment) do a pretty good job, and they are using a fairly high compression MPEG2, much better than the others though. But watch out, their format HDV compresses audio too, unlike DV which records at 16/48 PCM. Other things to consider are low light performance -- the HD cams, pretty much all of them except maybe the most expensive (like tens of thousands expensive) lose you a couple of f-stops, which can make the difference in low light / available light situations (bad low light ability = noise/grain). And finally, editing/encoding HDV codec video is more complicated. Doable, but much more of a PITA. In HDV's case, because it uses MPEG2, there is inter-frame compression being used (compression ACROSS frames). This is really bad for editing, so you usually have to use an "intermediary" codec for editing (if you want to do it right). Not to mention editing at those resolutions requires a really good computer, or you can't edit in real time without dropped frames. Finally, encoding and distributing HD is also a huge PITA right now. There is no HD DVD yet (practically speaking). And even when there is (soon), there's a format war going on and the devices and media will be expensive. So, encoding to downres to normal DVD works fine, and even looks really nice coming from HD, but you better get your downres encoding setting and deinterlacing right, or it'll look like shit -- plus, again, encoding this stuff is brutal on the resource requirements for your computer. You thought ripping/encoding for DVD was bad, wait 'til you start working with HD files. HD is to DV as DV is to WAV in terms of file size/management. Anyway, just a few things to ponder. For the non-professional, I say wait, get yourself a good DV cam instead.
Topic: HD Camera's soon affordable (Read 4241 times)