Posted by Mike Kujbida on 07/28/07 16:43

Personal opinion here (and not to take away from Smarty's excellent
response) is that, if the client wants it shot in 16:9 mode, use a
camera capable of doing this natively instead of shooting 4:3 and then
doing a fake 16:9 DVD 9i.e. cropping/letterboxing).

I had the opportunity earlier this year to borrow a friend's camera that
shoots real 16:9 (SD, not HD) to shoot a stage play. All I can is WOW!!
Seeing it on a 42" widescreen TV convinced me that, in the future,if
someone wants me to do widescreen, I'll use his camera again.

Mike


Smarty wrote:
> Peter,
>
> This is far from being a complete answer to your question, but I will quote
> a summary from a series of articles in EventDV Magazine by Jan Ozer which
> addresses this topic. I also encourage you to look at the entire article as
> well as the EventDV website where a number of related issues regarding HDV
> versus SD when authoring DVD5s are addressed.
>
> Here is the quote:
>
>
> "In the most conservative test, the results are very close. While the FX1
> down-sampled image looks a bit smoother, the DV camcorder image looks a bit
> sharper and clearer. In my view, however, the difference is so small that
> viewers wouldn't notice the lower quality of the FX1 unless they looked at
> the images side by side."
>
> http://www.eventdv.net/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=9491
>
> My experience personally has been that my FX1 HDV camcorder made slightly
> superior looking static images when compared to my Sony TRV900, an
> excellent, older SD camera. Moving images stressed the penalty of
> transcoding the HDV MPEG2 by downsampling into DVD format. I never really
> did directly compare the results from the same camera when producing SD
> versus HDV in producing an ultimate SD DVD5 disk, and have very little doubt
> that Jan Ozer's observation for the FX-1 was essentially correct.
>
> As I originally stated, Jan Ozer's articles and my anecdotal comments are
> hardly a complete answer to your question, and there are other very
> knowledgeable people here who have other experiences and opinions who will
> hopefully provide a full answer to your question.
>
> Smarty
>
>
> "peter" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:ksJqi.5676$Q85.1400@trndny02...
>> Let's say you are asked to taped a show and the client wants the final DVD
>> (not HDDVD or blue ray, just plain old DVD) in wide 16:9 format.
>>
>> Would there be a noticeable difference in quality whether the camera used
>> is a 4:3 camera (e.g. sony vx2100) with top and bottom chopped off, or a
>> 16:9 HD camera (e.g. canon XH A1)?
>>
>> Since the horizontal resolution of the HDV eventually gets converted to
>> 720, just like the 4:3 camera, in theory there would be no advantage in
>> using the HDV camera over the 4:3 one, right? Perhaps the HDV compression
>> would results in worse DVD because of the mpeg artifacts. But that's just
>> in theory. Has anyone actually tried both ways?

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