HDV is a high definition video format, jointly developed by Canon, Sharp, Sony and JVC that is recorded to the same miniDV cassettes used by standard DV camcorders.

The first HDV camcorder to be produced was Sony’s HDR-FX1, which was released in late 2004.

Since then, there hasn’t been a flood of HDV cameras, but Sony’s recently released HDR-HC1, which currently sells for around £1,000, is the first HDV camcorder that’s likely to be taken up by non-professional users and could signal the beginning of high-definition video recording for the consumer.

The HDV video frame has a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio and two possible vertical resolutions – 720p (progressive) and 1,080i (interlaced).

HDV cameras encode video in mpeg2 format: because the codec is more efficient than DV the data rate is the same as for the standard definition format – 25Mbits/sec – so it’s possible to fit 60 minutes of footage on a standard miniDV cassette.

Of the five products reviewed in our group test, three support HDV capture and, though Premiere Elements can’t capture HDV, if you can get it in, you can edit it. If you are thinking about buying an HDV camcorder, aside from having software that supports HDV capture, editing and output, there are a few others things you’ll need to think about.

The HDV format is more problematic for editing applications to handle. Whereas DV relies solely on intra-frame compression, the mpeg2 codec used by HDV also makes use of inter-frame, or temporal compression, which means that the image data in some frames needs to be generated with reference to adjacent frames.

This makes it difficult to edit because, rather than individual frames, the editor needs to deal with groups of frames (GOPs) which can be 12 or more frames long.

If an edit – a cut, transition, special effect, or title overlay – falls in the middle of a GOP, the whole group, rather than just the affected frames needs to be rendered, with time and quality implication.

Some applications, such as Adobe Premiere, transcode all the footage into an immediate format for editing to avoid these problems.

The drawback with this is that all your footage will suffer slight degradation, regardless of whether it’s edited or not.  Ulead Videostudio 9 and Pinnacle Studio 10 take the alternative approach and edit native DV.

Another consequence of mpeg2 encoding is that you may find not all the usual capture functions are available. In Ulead Videostudio 9, for example, when capturing HDV, split by scene and DV Quick Scan are not supported.

Another thing to consider is your hardware setup. Although it has the same data rate as DV, the higher resolution of HDV – more than four times greater than standard definition DV – and the requirement to generate frame data on the fly, place a burden your graphic processor and CPU.

In order to ensure a smooth workflow it’s worth aiming for recommended, rather than minimum requirements.

This is part of a group test looking at video editing software. For other products in the test, see:
Video Editing intro and Editor’s Choice 
Adobe Premiere Elements 2
Aist Movie DV7
Cyberlink Power Director 5 
Pinnacle Studio Plus 10 
Ulead Videostudio 9
Optimising video for handhelds
Features table

Buyers' Guide: Video-Editing Software

There's quite a bit to consider when purchasing video-editing software. We give you a helping hand  15 Feb 2006

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