SD DVD or HD DVD

0 percent. DVD players will NOT play an HD DVD disc. Only a couple of (now obsolete) Toshiba HD DVD players would play HD DVD discs. HD DVDs will also play on most later model Macs, but not on Windows systems.

-DH

If I burn a HD DVD, what's the percentage of DVD players that will play it?

zero. They would need a (now discontinued) HD DVD player. The chances they have one are about equal to the likelyhood of a snowball's chance of survival in the Sahara.

You are correct that DVDs are standard definition. Still, if you do an excellent job lighting, shooting, editing and compressing for authoring, it can look surprisingly good on big tvs.

x

A few more thoughts:

Learn how to properly set your Compressor bit rates and such and that will help with the quality too (as StudioX said)

I shoot to HDV but deliver SD DVDs that look great on large TVs. Not as good as if I make a blu ray disc or HD-DVD (I actually have a Toshiba!), but it's as good as it can be.

In many cases I use Dual Layer Verbatim discs which allow me to crank the bitrate up higher than i could with a single layer DVD.

And finally, shooting in HD will still give you better quality than just shooting in SD. From how I understand it, shooting in HD captures more information than SD would. That might be simplifying it, but there you have it.

And finally, shooting in HD will still give you better quality than just shooting in SD. From how I understand it, shooting in HD captures more information than SD would.

Let's be clear and not confuse pixel count with information. HD formats have more pixels but not necessarily more information than SD formats. It all depends on the flavor of the HD format. For example, HDV contains LESS info than DV.

This is why. HDV has the same data rate ( ~3.6 MB/s) as DV. It operates at the same color bit depth. So to get an image that is greater than 4x the pixel size of DV down to the same data stream size, some serious compression is taking place. Once the material goes through that compression in the camera, the information is lost. Aside from the image hit, the material is recorded in a very problematic format (mpeg2 based long GOP structure).

To get HDV to look good you need to understand the limitations of the format. Any noise introduced through small ccds and low light simply is magnified during compression. Any fast motion generates blocky sections as the compressor must keep the data rate down. To work around these limits means slow and steady camera movements and very well lit subjects. (good advice for anyone looking to create crisp and detailed images) Keep within the limits of the camera and format and it is easy to record good stuff. (Still, HDV doesn't make it easy to edit and/or compress for DVDs though!).

Cheers,

x

Of course, youre right. I've learned the limitations of HDV so I can get great results. The same thing goes with editing it. There's many ways to do it, but again, over the years I've come up with a good workflow (importing and exporting) that the clients are very pleased with.

In fact, picture quality is never a concern for our customers. Their biggest issues comes from an occasional lack of close-ups, but that is dictated by the "rules" churches have in place, not allowing us to move closer or be in certain areas of the church according to their faith. I still prefer outdoor weddings, even with the intro of wind noise and moving sunlight, because we can get so close to the bride and groom that those other occasional factors are forgiven by the couple.