Blog

Archive for the ‘D5’ Category

The sexiest video I have ever seen! HDCAM SR!!

Monday, March 17th, 2008

HDCAM SR leaves Pamela Anderson’s sex tape in the dust.

Just like the great format wars, Beta vs. VHS and Blu-Ray vs.  HD DVD, another video format has finally pushed its last pixel. Yes, the popular professional tape format D5 has finally been relegated to the digital wasteland of yore like its brethren, the Jazz Drive, Digital 8, and of course, its dark father, D2.

The giant studios like Universal and Disney have onlined many a show on the robust digital format of D5. But now, the majors have fallen in love with HDCAM SR, sexy young digital powerhouse of a tape format. This baby has 4K of the richest digital picture imaginable, and delivers full 4:4:4 at 440 Mbps. Yeah, this baby knows she’s hot.

Supporting 23.98/24/25/29.97/ 30PsF, 1080/50i/59.94/60i, and 720/59.94P, HDCAM SR was created to meet all common worldwide delivery requirements. It’s support the gamut of HD frame/line rates in both 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 formats using the highly efficient MPEG-4 Studio Profile compression scheme. The format supports 10 bit Log or linear, at 2.7:1 compression ratio in 4:2:2, and 4.2:1 compression ratio for 4:4:4. It can also run 12 channels of audio at 24-bit per sample resolution.  So yeah, this baby is about as sexy as they come.

But nobody said it’s cheap.  In fact, it’s painfully expensive and the studios are going to let years of  television disappear into the past without being archived on the HDCAM SR format because it is cost prohibitive unless the show was a hit.

So if you still have a couple  favorite shows on VHS tapes you recorded back in the day via your rabbit ears (also a relic of the past), you better transfer them to DVD yourself because that’s the best quality you will likely ever see again. But boy, that HDCAM SR is pretty damn sexy.

– Kirk