Reflections on High-Def Video

I’ve been traveling around the country for the last two months, talking about the impact of tapeless and high-definition video on video editors.

Generally, I begin each session by talking about how “the world is moving to high-definition video” — except, after thinking and talking about this for a while, I no longer believe this is the best way to describe the environment that we are in. A better phrase is that video has become completely divergent. There is now a complete disconnect between how we capture our images (shooting) with how we distribute our images (viewing).

Here are three examples that illustrate our conundrum:

• High-definition video (HD) is all the rage in North America, but Europe seems quite happy with 16:9 standard-definition PAL.
• US networks can’t agree on one high-end distribution format for video, instead we have three: 720p (ABC, Fox, ESPN), 1080i (CBS, NBC, PBS), and the Digital Cinema standard.
• We shoot on HD yet distribute on mobile devices, such as cell phones or iPods.

Yes, the camera manufacturers would like us all to buy new cameras – and the easiest way to get us to do that is to convince us that everything needs the vastly improved clarity of a high-defintion image.

But that misses the bigger point.

What is unique about the times we are in today, I think, is that the format that we use to shoot our images has almost nothing to do with the way we distribute them. There is now a total disconnect between acquisition and distribution.

Some of the most popular ways of distributing a video — YouTube, Google Video, cell phones, iPods — have images which are FAR smaller than even standard definition video.

Adding to the confusion, when we create our video, we now need to convert it into a myriad of different formats, sizes, and resolution for distribution.

Here’s what I think this means for the future:

• How the video is compressed, it’s “codec,” and its scanning (progressive vs interlaced), is more important than image size
• The ease of converting your video from one format to another is more important than image size
• Planning how you intend to distribute your video needs to be done before you shoot
• The image size you shoot is increasingly less important as your final output size decreases

The world is a different place today than ten years ago when our choices were essentially limited to broadcast, cable, and DVD. Today, we need to work backwards: pick our distribution format, then pick the format you want to edit, then pick the format you want to shoot.

And there seems to be a complete disconnect between each of those three stages.

Let me know what you think.