hdr-hc5 and transfer medium

5 Jul 2007 11:51 PM

nordic mist

The Sony HDR-HC5 supports firewire and HDMI transfers. Which one
would result
in the best resolution? If I bought a HDMI card for the PC, would I
obtain the uncompressed
image or would it be a mpeg2 stream?

Thanks, Jay Edwards

6 Jul 2007 5:53 AM

Frank

On Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:51:00 -0000, in 'rec.video.desktop',
in article <hdr-hc5 and transfer medium>,
nordic mist <jef***@gmail.com> wrote:

>The Sony HDR-HC5 supports firewire and HDMI transfers.

Correct.

>Which one would result in the best resolution?

There's little to no difference when playing back from (a
previously-recorded) tape.

>If I bought a HDMI card for the PC, would I obtain the uncompressed
>image or would it be a mpeg2 stream?

Using something such as the Blackmagic Design Intensity card, you'll
always be getting full-frame 1920 by 1080 square-pixel 8-bit 4.2.2
non-compressed video with two channels of 16-bit 48 kHz LPCM
non-compressed audio through the HDMI connector. However, there's only
a real quality benefit when you're taking in a live through-the-lens
source signal. If you're playing back from HDV tape, then what you're
getting is an uncompressed version of the lossy compressed 4:2:0
anamorphically squeezed non-square pixel 1440 by 1080 MPEG-2 video and
lossy compressed MPEG-1 Layer II audio that was recorded on the tape.

The thing to keep in mind when ingesting into an NLE via HDMI is that
you're not dealing with a 25 Mbps HDV datastream, but instead an
almost 1.5 Gbps datastream, so you had better have some large and fast
hard disk drive capability, although you also have the option of
transcoding to a mildly lossy codec such as the CineForm codec, which
is a short-GOP (2 frame) temporally and spatially compressed codec
that's almost visually lossless. Some systems are sufficiently fast to
perform this encoding operation on-the-fly, in realtime, while on
slower machines it will be necessary to write an uncompressed file to
disk and then later do a batch encoding operation.

Needless to say, the HDMI connector is also ideal for direct viewing
of footage, whether live or played back from tape, from the camcorder
to an HDMI-equipped HDTV.

>Thanks, Jay Edwards

You're welcome and HTH.

--
Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
[Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/