I have a few questions about making the switch to HD...

Currently I'm using a 3 CCD Panasonic MiniDV now and am pretty happy with it. I am curious on a few things.

When I capture film onto my comp it is typically 20 gig for about an hour of video... if i up it to HD will it jump the disc space a ton?

Also along the lines of that question if you shoot in 24p is the disk space required lowered because its 80% of the # of frames?

Thanks guys!

You can record in any of the HDV flavours - 1920x1080 50i, 1280x720 25p or 24p - and the result is always the same : 1 hour of video uses 13GB of disk space. This is because HDV uses MPEG2 compression to cram 1 hour of HD video on to the same miniDV tape that was originally designed for standard def DV. The bit rate for HDV is the same as for ordinary DV - 25mb/sec.

If you use a 'native' MPEG2 editor like Sony Vegas or Premiere Pro 2.0 that can edit MPEG2 on-the-fly then you don't need any more disk space for HDV than you do for SD, but you need a powerful PC to do it (3.4 GHz P4 or Dual Core).

If you use an editor like Premiere Pro 1.5.1 (with or without Cineform Aspect HD) your 13 GB of HDV has to be converted to an intermediate codec which results in an AVI file of about 20-25 GB. This takes extra time to do (capture time increases by 10-20%) but is easier to edit and gives you better performance on a less powerful PC (3.0 GHZ).

GG