Hi-

I have a question that I have been researching for my boss. He wants to know why we should archive/duplicate/re-make footage in a higher format? Yes, I know because it is better quality, but he wants to know why on a chroma subsampling level. I understand chroma subsampling a little, I know why certain formats are better than others, but my confusion is this... if your footage is recorded in certain chroma subsample (say DV, or even HDV) how can you make it any better (the image quality that is) by putting it on a HDcamSR tape? Isn't your quality only going to be as best as your source? So whats the advantage of putting it on a higher quality tape? (please help me out, like I said on a chroma subsampling level)

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I'm not sure how much chroma subsampling is going to help you in this case, since that's only one of the differences between these formats.

HDCAM SR is a high definition format. To copy your DV tapes to HDCAM SR, you would either be using only a fairly small portion of the image (leaving black bars on all sides) or you would have to enlarge (upres) the image. Even with that there would be black bars on the left and right unless you deliberately distorted the image to fit the format, which would look horrible.

You are correct that DV will never become more than DV. However, it might be advisable to use a better chroma format if you are compositing it with other material. So if you are creating special effects, the special effects might be better if you put it in a higher color space.

I believe that right now if you purchase (or already have) the latest version of Final Cut Studio, this is done for you already. You simply create a new project with a preset for the higher format and add DV footage to the timeline. The footage will be automatically combined with any special effects to create a full color space result.

I believe your boss is correct that aside from that consideration there is no reason to archive footage in something better than DV. However, one other consideration is that MiniDV tapes are not very durable. Copying MiniDV tapes to a more rugged format, such as the larger DV tapes or hard drives, would in fact be an excellent idea.

I would definitely be concerned about upsampling because it might actually reduce overall quality. Remember that every time you try to increase the size of an image in Photoshop, you're decreasing its quality. Try this experiment: Take any thumbnail image, such as my picture on my profile, and try to increase the size to 1024 pixels wide. The image will look horrible. If you then shrink it down you will find the information imperfectly saved and it will still look bad. So by all means at least keep the image at its original resolution for the highest possible quality editing.

Hope that helps.

D

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