Making Movies: What Does High Definition Really Mean?
So what does moving to a high-definition camcorder really mean in terms of quality? Let’s look at an example: this image is a frame from a video shot with the HDR-HC3 in HDV mode (warning: it’s a large 512KB image), while this is the same image in standard definition. Both images were saved as single frames in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 with deinterlacing enabled (which removes the jittery line effect you often see on captured video frames); the second was converted to standard definition using the HDR-HC3’s down-conversion feature. The black bars in both images are added by Premiere–you don’t see them in the video. Here’s another example: If you look at the photo of the cat’s whiskers in this video still, you’ll notice the extra resolution of the HDV frame. The 1080i HDV video that the HDR-HC3 records has much more resolution than the standard-definition image that has been down-converted: 1080i video is recorded at a resolution of 1080 by 1444 pixels, while standard-resolution video is
