HDV's Coming Up.

This article focuses on the high digital video (HDV). If one is not that familiar with HDV, it would be both a little surprising and completely understandable. HDV is nothing more than a format a future format at that and so it is perhaps not all that interesting to the active videographer or designer. But HDV is arguably the most intriguing format to come along since MPEG-2. The promise of HDV and, thus, the anticipation is very much like that of early DV nearly a decade ago. DV brought professional-quality digital acquisition to handheld camcorders and immediately shook up the high-end versus low-end industry caste system. The basics of HDV are actually remarkably straightforward. Instead of the 25Mb/sec intraframe compression of standard-definition DV, HDV uses the temporal, interframe compression of MPEG-2 to squeeze higher resolution into the same 25Mb/sec bitstream of standard DV. The second reason MPEG and other interframe codecs often get scoffed at for professional editing has to do with the potential loss of quality through the concatenated artifacts and errors that arise from the decompression-recompression cycles of rebuilding frames.