News From Hills
Hill’s “Flying High” with HD!
For immediate release
Hill’s Production Services announces that its latest documentary endeavour Sky Dive Television will be a complete turnkey High Definition Product utilizing Panasonic DVC-Pro HD Technology.
“So little is understood about selecting the best High-definition television format especially at the consumer level”, Rob Hill – Hill’s Production Services President states, “we need to get the word out that Hill’s is at the leading edge of this technology”.
“There are a lot of smaller production companies creating HD content for the web, but what makes Hill’s different is that we have the ability to work affordable solutions using a format that looks great on conventional television.”
Sky Dive Television chronicles the Canadian Women’s 34-way attempt recorded at Skydive Burnaby on the Lake Erie Shore last summer by producer Debbie Burke.
Hill’s also offers two edit suites capable of HD Production (Avid and FCP) as well post audio facility “Noizemaker Productions. Projects produced entirely in HD include: a series of Yamaha commercials “What Kind of Yamaha are You?” and corporate projects for the Canadian Lutheran Church and the Canadian Rubber Association “Safe Tire Week”.
As background, HDTV has been around for about 25 years, making the leap to the forefront over the last 4 years. That given, high-definition (HD) production for video and film is increasing rapidly, as is the consumer purchasing high-definition-capable displays. Consumers are demanding high quality content that takes advantage of these better displays.
Today’s High Definition Production Industry uses a variety of digital tape recording formats for professional production, including formats developed by Sony and Panasonic. These formats use the existing physical tape formats of earlier standard definition formats, but with new compressed bit streams. Fortunately, with HD, the dream of a wholly digital workflow has been realized.
As you consider High Definition for your next project, you should realize that the picture quality changes with every recording application. Basically the bigger the image is projected, the bigger the storage format.
The following digital tape formats are commonly used for HD recording:
HDCAM. The Sony HDCAM format supports 1080 resolutions at frame rates of 24p, 25p, 50i, and 60i. HDCAM stores the video at 1440 x 1080, which is a 33 percent reduction horizontally from 1920. It also uses a unique color sampling of 17:6:6, which means that HDCAM has only half the color detail of other HD formats. HDCAM is 4.4:1 compressed and is 8-bit, but supports 10-bit input and output.
D5-HD. The Panasonic D5-HD format uses the D5 tape shell. Unlike HDCAM, D5-HD can do 720/60p, 1080/24p, 1080/60i, and even 1080/30p. D5-HD compresses at 4:1 in 8-bit mode and 5:1 in 10-bit mode, and supports 8 channels of audio.
DVCPRO-HD. This Panasonic HD format, sometimes called D7-HD, is based on the same tape shell used for DVCAM and DVCPRO. D7-HD does 720/60p and 1080/60i, with 1080/24p in development. It uses 6.7:1 compression, and supports 10-bit input and output per channel. DVCPRO-HD supports 8 channels of audio.
HDV. This format is one of a number of emerging formats that are being used in lower-cost cameras. HDV was introduced with JVC's groundbreaking professional consumer (prosumer) HD camera, the JY-HD10, which records highly compressed MPEG-2 on a mini DV tape.
You should be aware that HDV is a MPEG-2 transport stream that includes a lot of error correction. Its video uses interframe-compressed MPEG-2, at 19 megabits per second (Mbps) for 720p and 25 Mbps for 1080i. Audio is encoded with 384 Kbps MPEG-1 Layer 2 stereo. Interframe encoding enables HDV to achieve good quality video at lower bit rates, which means much more content per tape, but it increases the difficultly of editing the content. Hill’s offers HDV as well as DVCPro-HD production formats.
Ask for our demo reel and competitively creative packages.
For more information, contact:
Gerry Milinkovic
HILL'S PRODUCTION SERVICES
(905) 335-1146
Email: gm@hillsvideo.com