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08/23/2006
Distributing HD Content
I hear from customers all the time asking why they should be shooting and editing in HDV? Their main concerns are the cost of new equipment and the lack of a valid distribution format. Eventually we are all going to have to make the switch to HD, but as always the earlier adopters will end up paying for the privlege of working through the kinks.
More and more people are buying HDTV sets for their homes and are hungry for HD content. Right now most of that content comes from a select few Satellite and Cable channels and a few shows on the local OTA affiliates who have upgraded. Besides that, we are just barely starting to see the studios releasing HDDVD/Blu-Ray movies. At prices near $1000 for the Blu-Ray Players currently available there isn't a very high demand yet.
So, what does this mean for the videographer? When he's trying to sell his services as a producer of HD material he has to not only convince the client that HD is better, but he also has to make it easy for them to play the HD material. So far, this has been the main stumbling block.
If you find a client who actually has a Blu-Ray player, you can make him a Blu-Ray disk using the Pioneer Blu-Ray Burner. For the price of that unit though, you had better hope that customer can give you a lot of jobs, or you find more clients like him to help pay off your new equipment.
The primary delivery method so far has been to compress your HD material down to a format like DivX, MP4, or WMV that allows you to burn the program on to a standard DVD-R or sometimes even a CD. This is easily accomplished with software like Sorenson Squeeze, Canopus Procoder, or even the free encoders built into some of the NLEs. This is definitely more affordable, but does require that the viewer watch the video on a computer.
The exciting thing about these smaller compressed formats for HD encoding though is the ability to stream the video over the Internet. There are far more people with Broadband Internet access than those that even have HDTVs, so I think this is currently a viable solution. It can be as easy as uploading your finished, encoded, video to a server and putting a link in an email or on your web page. If your customer base is open to this idea you can sell it, and then keep the HD masters for final HD disk format down the road.
For those videographers working with corporate clientele you can use a similar computer-based HD playback method using compressed HD formats. Both Canopus and Matrox make solutions that allow HD Plasma screens throughout a corporate environment to be networked together. The Matrox Extio allows you to send a video signal through fiber optic to video monitors throughout a building. The Canopus MediaEdge3 now supports HD files and works over a network allowing you to create program schedules and more.
Ashley Guy
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