The State of Editing HDV

HDV@Work#2: "Read More The State of Editing HDV
Steve Mullen

As you made your away around the nonlinear editor booths at NAB, it´s very likely you were presented with marketing messages that promoted each company's ideal way of editing HDV.
The four techniques include draft, proxy, native, and digital intermediate. Let´s work our way through all these options. The use of FireWire and MiniDV tape makes it easy for folks to think of HDV as simply high-definition DV. There are, however, significant differences that make HDV editing very different from DV editing. There are three crucial differences. First, HDV uses inter-frame compression, while DV does not. Second, HDV audio is MPEG-1 Layer 2, not PCM. And third, the number of pixels is either 2.7X (1280x720) or 4.5X (1440x1080) the number of pixels employed by DV.
All these differences lead to the need for a huge amount of computation to accomplish editing. This need can be satisfied in several ways. One alternative breaks the task into less computationally intensive steps, which is the approach used by the draft, proxy, and digital intermediate solutions. "