In this earlier article, I mentioned trying out Paolo Ciconne’s Trucolor preset. I am pleased to say that I have used Trucolor on my XH-A1s for the last three weddings with great success. The colors and flexibility of this preset are amazing.

We have been experimenting with this remarkable little camera over the past two weeks, including using it at a wedding. First, this is not a “pro” camera. The HV30 is an HDV camcorder for the consumer market. Is is small, light, and lacks the some of the controllability that we expect in a professional camera. It also uses a single image sensor rather than the three that a pro camcorder would have. The major downside of this is that the HV30 doesn’t perform well in low light, relative to a three chip camera. However it’s low light performance is better than most single chip camcorders.

While the HV30 doesn’t have the controllability of a camera like the XH-A1 that we use, it still as a lot of control available. You can set shutter speed and focus manually. There is also manual exposure control, although you can’t easily set a specific f stop. There are zebras (70 and 100%), as well as magnification and peaking to assist in manual focusing. You can also shoot in 24p (24 fps progressive scan) mode for a more film-like look.

The best part is that in good light the image from an HV30 rivals that of the XH-A1. Last week I used it at a wedding as a balcony camera. It was no problem intercutting the footage from the HV30 with the XH-A1. After a little balancing of levels you would be hard pressed to tell which camera shot what. Considering that the HV30 coast only $750 while the XH-A1 is $3400, this is remarkable.

I also shot some action footage at a local horse show a couple of days ago. The camera was hand held the entire time, and looked great due to the excellent optical image stabilizer.

Among consumer camcorders, the HV30 is top-notch. You can’t get anything better for the price. You will be able to get professional quality images from the HV30 in many situations. Just make sure that you learn how to use it and know it’s limitations. And excellent resource for the camera is the HV20/HV30 User Forum.

There has been a lot of press lately regarding the imminent demise of Toshiba’s HD-DVD format for high definition DVDs. The entire war between HD-DVD and Sony’s Blu-Ray format wasn’t good for the industry, as consumers were not interested in purchasing the next Betamax. Wedding videographers have been following this closely. Many have invested in high definition equipment, but have only been delivering standard definition to their clients due to the fact that few had purchased either a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player.

Hopefully this will change. Toshiba is about to cease production of HD-DVD. Netflix and Blockbuster are only renting Blu-Ray. Best Buy and Walmart have announced that they will exclusively carry Blu-Ray from now on. The only thing in the way of mass adoption by the public is the high price of Blu-Ray players. It is hard to find one for less than $350, where an HD-DVD player can be had for $150. The Sony Play Station 3 has a built in Blu-Ray drive, but it isn’t the most popular game console.

Standard definition DVDs look very good on high definition televisions. With an upsampling DVD player (available for under $100), the quality is very good, not quite HD, but close enough for most people. If you have a really big 1080p television (over 50 inches), you will see a significant difference. If you have a smaller set, you may not. TVs are getting bigger though. I bought a 32 inch set 2 1/2 years ago for about $2000. That will get you a television twice as large these days.

So what does this mean for delivering wedding video on HD? I believe that in the future as prices drop on Blu-Ray, it will become the norm. There are those who don’t think that high def DVDs will ever catch on, that online delivery will take over. The problem with using the Internet is that the enormous bandwidth required for HD video may not be available. Also there is a significant portion of the population who still does not have broadband Internet.

Also people like to have something tangible. If everyone just wanted to rent movies, stores like BestBuy wouldn’t be stocking so many DVDs.

Since a wedding video is a keepsake, most couples would prefer to have a disk to keep. DVDs will be around a long time. As long as Blu-Ray catches on, it will too.

Our plan is to deliver both standard DVD and Blu-Ray in the future. This will allow our clients to watch their wedding on any DVD player, and also have a high definition copy to view on Blu-Ray.

By the way, lest you think of me as a Blu-ray fanboy, I bought an HD-DVD player in December. At least I didn’t purchase too many movies. I did get used to watching HD-DVD movies from Netflix. Now I will have to buy a Blu-Ray player to do that.

As videographers move towards the world of HD, delivery is still a problem. One issue is the format war. Even though the balance seems to be tipping in favor of BluRay, HD-DVD still needs to be considered. The other issue is media. BluRay writers are out there for around $500. HD-DVD burners are more difficult to find. Media costs are still quite high. In addition software can be an issue, particularly for Mac users. Apple’s DVD Studio Pro at this time only supports HD-DVD, while  Windows users have a number of BluRay authoring products out there.

Regarding media, there is a solution to producing HiDef DVDs without investing in a new writer. Both BluRay and HD-DVD can be written to a standard (red laser) DVD. Using H264 encoding it is possible to put 30 minutes or more of HD video on a single layer disk and more than an hour on a dual layer disk. I have made HD-DVDs using H264 that play fine on my Toshiba A3 HD-DVD player. For wedding videographers this means that we can put our short form and highlights videos on a single disk. That is what I plan to do when I go HD.

Of course a lot of experts say that neither BluRay or HD-DVD will ever catch on. There is certainly some good reasons to believe this. Most people are quite happy with the image that today’s up-scaling DVD players deliver. If there isn’t a significant jump in quality, the public won’t buy. This happened a few years ago when two competing high resolution audio formats, SACD and DVD Audio,were introduced. The improvement wasn’t noticeable to most people. In addition all DVD Audio disks (as well as some SACD disks) would not play in an ordinary DVD player. At the same time, online delivery of music was getting popular. As a result consumers stayed away, and both formats died out.

This could happen to HiDef DVD video.  If the consumer isn’t interested, and online delivery of video takes off, High Definition DVDs could fade away. I for one hopes that this doesn’t happen. My clients would not like it if they only way that they get their wedding videos in HD is to download them. When we have gone HD we will still deliver our videos on standard definition DVD. In  they will still look great, even on a big HD television. We will be watching how the BluRay HD-DVD war plays out. Most likely we will also deliver on one (or both) of those formats. There is also the option of creating a high definition file that can be played on a computer. If high definition DVDs fail in the marketplace, we may give clients the option of getting their video in HD on an external hard drive.