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MillimeterShooting for Streaming, Part 1
Aug 11, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
This month’s offering is a drama showing just how far a man will go to prove that he's right (or perhaps, not wrong). What’s in it for you besides the guilty pleasure of reading a desperate nail-biter? It’s called stealth learning. Hidden in the suspenseful plotline are some invaluable lessons about shooting for streaming, ways in which different timeline presets can impact compressed quality in some programs, and which format and settings to use when exporting intermediate files from your editor for encoding elsewhere. Who says learning has to be dull?
The story begins in the form of a running debate between myself and a colleague named Tim Siglin, an industry analyst and consultant. Tim claimed that shooting in HD for streaming delivery produces dramatically better results than shooting in SD, even if the target resolution of the streaming file is smaller than SD.
Most HDV camcorders can also shoot in DV mode. To refresh your memory, HDV has a pixel resolution of 1440x1080 with a display aspect ratio of 1:33, which means that the horizontal pixels are zoomed out to 1920 for a full-resolution 16:9 display of 1920x1080. In 16:9 mode, DV is captured at 720x480 pixels with an aspect ratio of 1:2, so the horizontal pixels are zoomed out to 864 pixels for a full-resolution widescreen display of 864x480.
Assume that you were planning to stream a 16:9 file at 640x360 resolution. Tim’s claim was that you’d get significantly better results by shooting in HDV. I claimed the results would be indistinguishable from DV, and my standard practice is to shoot in DV mode when shooting for streaming in less-than-SD resolutions.
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This debate has gone on for some time, but I’ve never run comparative tests because I’ve never had two identical camcorders at the same time to run them. Obviously, with two different camcorders, any qualitative differences could relate to the camcorders, not the difference between acquiring in HD vs. SD.
I could have run the test sequentially with the same camera, shooting first in one mode, then the other, but felt the test needed a live component which you can never duplicate when shooting sequentially. Long story short, when fellow shooter Carrie Cannaday called to say that she was coming by to visit the Galax, Va., Old Fiddlers Convention this past week, I asked her to bring her Canon XH A1—which gave me a matching set.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
