D5 vs. HD cam Film Master
 

I am currently transferring 35mm selects on a Spirit with 2k Davinci color correct for a short film and have been laying down to HD Cam. This master must serve as both the Video master for Digi-beta downconvert and also for a possible film out at a later date.
I have recently been told however that the preferred format to master to is D5. Is this just a preference/propaganda issue or are there valid reasons for one over the other? I believe the color sampling is slightly lower on HD cam, but I'm unaware of any other disparities. Thanks for any help.

Can make a difference
 

HD D5 is uncompressed and offers the full 1920 by 1080 resolution of HDTV. HDcam is limited to 1440 pixel horzontal and is compressed. For most work this probably would not be a big deal, but that 33% additional image data which could improve your film quality. If you can afford it go with D5, even if it's just for mastering.

D5 is DCT compressed just like HDCAM, however there are resolution deferences like Doug suggested (HDCAM is only 1440x1080 3:1:1 samples vs D5's full res 4:2:2 sampling.) Plus D5 is a 10bit (1024 luma level) compression at 235Mb/s vs HDCAM 8bit (256 luma levels = some banding in color correction) at 140Mb/s. For a 35mm film transfer D5 will preserve the subtlies better than HDCAM.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

D5 is compressed!
 

vergot the 10bits/sample the 1st bit LSB each is the noise at the signal and that you lost in all digitalsystems the're on the market is the DCT compression by 4:1 and then in the macroblockalgorytm.
the DiscretCosinusTransformation transform all the high Frequencys away.

at 1920x1080 you have a bitrate 1920x1080x30bitx30Frames= 1866240000bit/s /8bit= 233,28MB/s so tell me how the can store a rate like this without compression? D5 also compress the information
with huffman and DCT4:1 - there is no machine exist that can record a datarate with this rate 233,28MB/s (a rotating harddisk in a dust free area with 7200rpm can record around 20MB/s without a filesystem - streamingmode) how fast mast flying the videoheads (scanner/rotation) in a dust room [at a hd each picture frame is recorded over 12 helical tracks]
i think you can not see it direct in the color we'r screening on a digital cinema wall with 21meter sidewith an the quality is very good :)

br

Where does DVCPRO HD fit into all of this (meaning the format captured into FCP over firewire) ?

Jeff

FightClubTB, :)

Perhaps you can start a new thread with your question and let this thread fade off into oblivion where it belongs. These folks just popped in to amaze us (more like bewilder) with their "knowledge".
What the hell does this mean???
Sorry for the rant in the meantime I'll be searching for info for you and hopefully someone who knows what they are talking about will respond... ;)

HD D5 uses standard D5 video tape cassettes to record HD material, using a intra-frame compression with a 4:1 ratio. HD D5 supports the 1080 and the 1035 interlaced line standards at both 60 Hz and 59.94 Hz field rates, all 720 progressive line standards and the 1080 progressive line standard at 24, 25 and 30 frame rates. Four uncompressed audio channels sampled at 40 kHz, 20 bits per sample, are also supported.