So long HDV, we hardly knew you. (HDV RIP in 2007) at FreshDV

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So long HDV, we hardly knew you. (HDV RIP in 2007)

Published by admin December 13th, 2006 in News

Former Panasonic executive Tore Nordahl is at it again. His latest edition of coax.tv, entitled “Will Panasonic’s AVC-Intra/P2 and Grass Valley’s JPEG2000/CF push out MPEG-2 in 2007?” suggests that MPEG-2 and more specifically HDV as an acquisition format will very soon be going the way of the buffalo.

“…HDV by definition is a temporary format in my opinion, particularly now that non-linear storage AVCHD consumer camcorders are shipping. And with flashRAM taking over as removable storage, there is little need to limit professional compressed bitrate to 25Mbps. HDV camcorders started shipping in 2004. In my opinion, HDV camcorder sales will drop significantly in the second half of 2007, and drop sharply in 2008. That is only a short 5-year life-span: 2004 -2008.”

We previously covered Nordahl’s AVC-HD soliloquy back in August. He’s now touting that those predictions are right on schedule, and that there will be affordable alternatives to long-GOP compression as early as 2007.

“You’ll have a choice, and there may not be a need to settle for MPEG-2 long GOP. Early in 2007 you’ll have the less than $30,000 fully professional HD camcorders choices from Panasonic (AVC-Intra) and Grass Valley (JPEG2000). Later in 2007, I predict that you’ll see less than $10,000 AVC-Intra HD camcorders from Panasonic as well as AVC/JPEG2000 models from other suppliers.”

He goes on to state that Panasonic will offer two pro intra-frame HD compression modes in their new HD camcorders in 2007 (AVC-Intra-50 and AVC-Intra-100), that Sony will announce a competing intra-frame CODEC capable HD camcorder by NAB 2007.

5 Responses to “So long HDV, we hardly knew you. (HDV RIP in 2007)”

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1 Anonymous Dec 17th, 2006 at 2:26 am

Panasonic Schill I think, talks a small amount of sense and whole lot of rubbish.
2 Luc Dec 20th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

Hello,

Been a former Panasonic executive, this guy both knows what he is talking about .. and as perhaps a little bias toward Panasonic solutions.

I think he makes two mistakes in this very clever and documented paper. The first one is a marketing mistake, the second one, that is related to the first, is a timeframe mistake.

Marketing mistake because people doesnâ€™t buy a format they buy a camcorder, a workflow, a set of software, a storage solution and so on.
If people were to buy a format, sure nearly everyone would be shooting in DVC Pro HD or not.

As interesting that AVCHD format can be, today and very likely for the months/few years to come, interesting camcorder are in HDV.
A single point : Flash based solution as clearly the way the world will go somewhere; but today it means asking to video guys to become computers gurus, few are. The good old tape is â€œrather secure storage enabledâ€?, flash is not right now (and not a lot of people are experts at managing hard disk arrays)

Timeframe mistake because even if its clear that in a few years, very good AVCHD camcorder ,are released by Panasonic, very good version of existing NLE are released by software vendor, very good backup solutions are provided by computer companies.. right now itâ€™s not the case.
I can shout that gas is dead, in a perhaps not so distant future weâ€™ll put something else in our car. Bu right now if I want to drive somewhere, I have to put gas in my car.

So in real life, the point of AVCHD been superior or not to HDV, seems rather pointless.

My two cents.

Luc
3 freshdv Dec 20th, 2006 at 4:59 pm

Excellent points Luc. It’s funny you should mention the “video guru vs. computer guru” issue…I was talking with an associate about that just this morning. I completely agree, an IT workflow really demands that people learn both worlds…and that’s not always easy.

Thanks for the comment.
4 esplak Feb 4th, 2007 at 11:26 am

In WW2 Hitler put enormous amount of effort and money to produce exotic weapons mainly the V2 rocket bomb, neglecting tanks and bullets. By the time his weapon was ready he had essentially lost the world.

I believe that was the case of the P2 and probably the case of the upcoming AVCintra format. Excellent in paper, but without a credible workflow at the moment. Since technology advances so fast by the time these solutions will be fully functional there will be new kids on the block and probably they will be more short lived than HDV.(As things turn out DVCPRO HD will live less than HDV).

Panasonic hasn’t yet understand that their problem is not the compression scheme but the capacity of their recording format. Every person that has bought a HVX200 I know, they had purchased, at the same time a firestore. essentially bypassing the P2 format for which they had payed most of their money.

In my opinion NLA (non linear acquisition) will be based on a disc format (hard disc, blue ray, holographic etc.) because this format will always carry a huge advantage over flash in terms of capacity and value. The people who cherish for the doubling of capacity of flash memory forget that the same applies to disc based formats, thus widening the gap considerably(i.e. flash goes from 8Gb to 16Gb and at the same time blue ray goes from 25Gb to 50Gb and hard disc now dances around 1Tb).

esplak