HD/SD thoughts
When we start a project, there’s always a decision to be made about what video format to shoot on – Standard Definition (SD) or High Definition (HD). SD was for many years the norm for us, shooting in DVCam, and indeed most of the films you can see on our website are shot this way. The turning point for me as a director / cameraman came when I got a phone call a couple of years ago from a client frantic that their newly-commissioned video looked “terrible” in the just-finished marketing suite…
I was of course mortified and rushed across town to see what was going on. The problem was immediately clear. The SD film was being shown on a 60″ plasma screen and the client was watching it from just 2 feet away. The uncomfortable truth is that flat-screen televisions, especially big ones over 40″ are really only any good when a) viewed from a long way back (3x the screen dimensions away experts say) or b) with an HD feed at any distance.
Short of putting a line on the floor with a sign saying “view no closer than this…”, it was clear that HD was the answer for when the film was to be displayed on a large screen in a marketing suite. The next job that came in, on the Banyan Tree Corniche Bay development in Mauritius, the client chose HD and the finished film looked fantastic when projected onto a screen nearly 10 feet across! You can see that film our film portfolio page.
Other bonuses of HD are a much classier “look” than SD – think Planet Earth rather than Bargain Hunt in the way the camera deals with the light / shade / depth of field. Also, the footage is likely to be more future-proof when it comes to creating an archive for future video projects. More and more TV is going HD as standard and soon SD will just look old-fashioned. The downside is a slight increase in production cost – around 10%-15% of the total film budget we estimate – as the HD cameras are that much more expensive to hire and the post-production needs a bit more kit / time.
Having said that, as we increasingly use HD for our projects, there’s been one unexpected bonus emerge which is helping to spread the cost for the client. The HD picture quality is so high that you can take still images from the screen which are perfectly good for online use. At 1920 x 1080 pixels (ie c2 megapixels in regular camera terms) the HD screen grab is probably not quite good enough for full page print use but it’s not far off.
See some factory shots from our current Aquarium Architecture project as examples.
Tagged as: High definition 1080p Marketing films Photography Property films