Filming in HD / Sebastian's Studios signs Exclusives

[derekt]

Effective Friday January 16th, 2009 Sebastian's Studios has began filming in High Definition.
The decision was made because the content was good, but once the DVDs were made, they began to fade. After this procedure in our encoding processes for online streaming via our sites and membership sites, the content faded a bit more.
Prior to our past weekends production, we did some testing with the new cameras before filming. We found this is a much better outcome.
I know this is old news, but just thought we would make this public information.

________________________

ALSO, Sebastian's Studios is pleased to announce we have signed 4 models exclusive. Below are the pictures. These models are required to do a minimum of 5 production shoots within the next 365 days, we will be developing membership sites on the models. And more.

[vaqueros]

Congrats on your decision to do all filming in high def. Even if standard def DVDs and standard def video files continue for a couple of years to be the common physical and online vehicles for getting content to the consumer, eventually higher capacity vehicles will take over...Blue-Ray, super broadband, solid state memory chips, or whatever tech marvels come next. When that happens, all of your HD content will be ready to be repackaged rather than tossed out because it can't be upconverted with good enough quality. Smart move to prepare for the near future.

However, I'm not sure what you mean when you say your standard def content has "faded"? Could you explain that? Thanks.

[derekt]

However, I'm not sure what you mean when you say your standard def content has "faded"? Could you explain that? Thanks.

First, thank you very much for your kind words. It is greatly appreciated.

To answer your question. When we begin filming in 2005 up until the middle of 2007 DVDs were produced in Hi-8. After this time until this prior weekend footage was shot in Mini DV format.
After comparing footage, there was a noticeably large difference in the overall video quality. During the conversion encoding processes the quality faded. Videos were imported from the master tape as an AVI file. The video was encoded to wmv... which of course compresses the video. However, we're doing things the same way now with the HD footage. After the encoding process is completed, yes the quality is still compressed but not as noticeable as it was before. It's rather hard to explain as I'm not that tech savvy.

Even still images now. In the past we were taking stills with a Olympus 4.0 megapixel camera.
This past shoot over the weekend, stills were taken with a 10.1 megapixel camera.
Here's the link of the digital camera we are now using: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/produ...ct_id=10251137

And even with the camera change, you could notice a huge difference. (The pictures I shown in my original post on this thread were shot with this camera.

So making the change, I can honestly state that HD is the way to go if you want good quality. After noticing the difference we are absolutely pleased with this outcome.

There was a thread on here from another GWW member. I can't recall the actual thread. However, I can say that we will always film on tape whether it's a MiniDV or a HDV / HD MiniDV tape. We feel, however since I'm speaking... I feel that it's always best to film on a tape. When we film what happens is the video is imported onto a computer's desktop. It then prepares to go into editing. After the editing process is over with that, the files are then moved onto an external hard drive. But what if the footage is lost, you delete the video off the chip or hard drive on a video camera... Your fucked (excuse my language) out of the footage. I believe you should always have a back up. My $0.02

[gaybucks_chip]

If you're shooting HD on DV tape, it's not really HD. The maximum bandwidth the HDV format can record is 25Mbits/sec. True HD is 100Mbits/sec.

There's a big difference in color depth between HDV and HD, and there are also real issues with fast motion and other things due to the very high compression that HDV uses. That isn't to say that it's better than DV, but DV is already a compressed technology, and when you're shooting HDV, you're basically cramming 4 times the information into the same amount of bandwidth, so it's a lot more lossy and prone to artifacting.

In the longer term, you might want to rethink the idea of being wed to DV/HDV tape. I agree that backups are important, and using LTO or SDLT tape backups is a good way to give you a permanent storage medium that's not lossy and ensures you'll always be able to get your HD content back.

[vaqueros]

Thanks for the explanation. I was thinking of "faded" in the sense of film and wondering how on earth there could be time-and-sun bleaching of an electronic medium! It seems you're referring to the problems of quality loss due to compression of the video from its original RAW form into the standard formats like MPG and MOV (yes, RAW is actually a video format, not just a code word for bareback!).

There is almost always loss of quality during conversion to a greater or lesser degree. It's essential to convert because even standard def video is huge...if I recall correctly, typical footage on mini-DV tapes runs about 13 GB per hour. Clearly that's too big to put on a DVD or download from a website and you can imagine how large high def files would be!

With HD, compression loss becomes less of an issue. For example's sake, say that you lose 20% of the quality during compression. With high def, you're already starting out with at least 300% more resolution in the picture so after losing the same 20% to compression, the quality is still incredible. You can always keep compressing down (and losing more quality) to get the balance you want between size and quality...but you can never upconvert beyond the original resolation without making the quality appear to be worse.

As to using DV tape for archiving, it's a good idea to have multiple backups no matter what the original recording medium is. Tape can be damaged by magnetism, flood, fire, or mechanical failure or simple degrade after time just like most other storage media. You would be more secure if you burn extra copies of the original footage to portable harddrives, Blue-Ray discs, or LTO tapes as gaybucks_chip suggested. Extra hassle now but if disaster ever strikes, you'll be relieved to know you have copies of your irreplaceable footage stored offsite (maybe in Dick Cheney's currently unused secret underground bunker).

[nickbaer]

I've been doing SD 640x480, SD 720x480, SD 16:9... and then HD and HDV for almost 2 years.

Complex issues that can't be addressed at Wal*Mart.