H.264 HD is AMAZING ( 56K Warning Includes pics)

[Downdivx]

Sigh... I guess it's time for the dual g5... goodbye wallet.....

So can someone give me an acurate file size for around 2 hours of hd video from a hd camera?
Will I need terrabytes of space to work with?

Enclave,
It depends on the HD Camera you get. Whatever camera it is, it won't record HD in H.264. H.264 is a compressed format and I'm not aware of any devices out there that can record it in real time in HD in good quality. If you get a HDV camera (Sony, JVC, Panasonic) it will be the same bit rate as DV - 25 mbps. You should be able to edit that on a Powerbook. If you get an uncompressed HD camera you'll need a G5 - bit rates start at 50 and go to 280.

So this is "The Year of HD"? How about "The Year of Distributed Encoding/Rendering"? I can't wait to check out the new compressor that will do encoding across multiple machines (I assume that means H.264 and not just MPEG). GridIron's software for distributed windows media encoding (windows only, of course) also looks pretty cool.

W

 

[LethalWolfe]

Enclave,
It depends on the HD Camera you get. Whatever camera it is, it won't record HD in H.264. H.264 is a compressed format and I'm not aware of any devices out there that can record it in real time in HD in good quality. If you get a HDV camera (Sony, JVC, Panasonic) it will be the same bit rate as DV - 25 mbps. You should be able to edit that on a Powerbook. If you get an uncompressed HD camera you'll need a G5 - bit rates start at 50 and go to 280.

Just a minor tweak, Sony and JVC use HDV. Panasonic does not. Their new prosumer camera is capable of shooting full-on HD using the DVCPro HD codec.

I think a lot of people are getting the wrong idea about h.264. It's a distribution format, not an acquisition format. It's super-compressed and compression is one thing production and post production people want to avoid like the plague.


Lethal