questions for the video pros here

[GetCarter]

Q1 - If I'm shooting a documentary type film on a pro camcorder in HD and I want to add some stills I assume that the stills would best be 1920 x 1080 pixels?

Q2 - Saving the result onto a Blu Ray disk is the best way to store it? (Just in the unlikely event that it ever gets broadcast in HD) ETA it'll be about 55 mins long - so I'll need to buy a Blu Ray burner....and it's run on any blu Ray player at native res?

Q3 - Choosing 'Output onto a standard def DVD' will squash it all to 720 x 576 right?

The last time I worked in a video studio U-Matic was considered pretty cool, so don't get too techie with me ok?

Edited by GetCarter on Monday 21st December 08:55

[Road2Ruin]

GetCarter said:

Q1 - If I'm shooting a documentary type film on a pro camcorder in HD and I want to add some stills I assume that the stills would best be 1920 x 1080 pixels?

Q2 - Saving the result onto a Blu Ray disk is the best way to store it? (Just in the unlikely event that it ever gets broadcast in HD) ETA it'll be about 55 mins long - so I'll need to buy a Blu Ray burner....and it's run on any blu Ray player at native res?

Q3 - Choosing 'Output onto a standard def DVD' will squash it all to 720 x 576 right?

The last time I worked in a video studio U-Matic was considered pretty cool, so don't get too techie with me ok?

Edited by GetCarter on Monday 21st December 08:55

Q1. The photos are best at 1080 but your camera may have a larger resolution than this. They will be resized when output to the final article anyway.

Q2. It doesn't matter what medium you store it on as it will have to be transcoded depending on where you intend to watch it. If you want to take it to a friends and watch it on their blue ray player then you will have to save it as a blue ray movie on a blue ray disk for example.

Q3 If you then turn it into a DVD movie then yes the resolution will be reduced to 720 x 576.

Pete

[mikef]

GetCarter said:

Q1 - If I'm shooting a documentary type film on a pro camcorder in HD and I want to add some stills I assume that the stills would best be 1920 x 1080 pixels?

HD is typically either 720p (1280 x 720), 1080i or 1080p (both 1920 x 1080). You can resize the stills yourself to match, which gives you more control over the process including colour matching, or your video editing software can do it for you. If you're cropping to the video safe area, it may be worth doing yourself.

GetCarter said:

Q2 - Saving the result onto a Blu Ray disk is the best way to store it? (Just in the unlikely event that it ever gets broadcast in HD) ETA it'll be about 55 mins long - so I'll need to buy a Blu Ray burner....and it's run on any blu Ray player at native res?

I'd consider storage and distribution separately. You can store it on any medium that will take a file that size. If it's going to be broadcast, you'd be best exporting it at the highest resolution (least compression) that you can. Once resolution is lost, it's lost. For distribution, you could burn to a Blu-Ray, or just stick it on to an appropriate sized USB thumb drive, which could be more cost-effective for low volume. Blu-ray will compress and lose some detail, so I wouldn't only save as a blu-ray DVD. Of course, you can also burn the distribution files (say H.264 or WMV-HD) to a blu-ray disk as storage media, which is different from authoring a blu-ray DVD.

GetCarter said:

Q3 - Choosing 'Output onto a standard def DVD' will squash it all to 720 x 576 right?

Probably. I would be inclined to downsize to SD in the NLE (I use Final Cut Pro) rather than trust the DVD burning software to optimize it.

[GetCarter]

Thanks chaps... didn't realise Blu Ray squashed as it wrote. I'll bung the finished file on an external drive as a 'safe' and burn as needed.

[GetCarter]

Just made the title sequence in 1080 - 58 seconds... 420 mb

I'm going to need a bigger boat!

Edited by GetCarter on Monday 21st December 14:46

[mikef]

I generally allow 0.25GB a minute for working on 1080i HDV (which is of course a compressed format itself, so depends what what your video source is).

[_dobbo_]

Try using your Leica Steve - about 10 mins of video will pretty much fill a 4Gb card in my experience!

It's a shame the sound is so crap because otherwise it would be a handy HD video camera.