Editing HD Video

Working with the video of camcorders such as the Sony HDR-HC1 can produce a serious business. HD video contains four times the number of pixels that standard definition offers, and it’s much more heavily compressed.

Keep in mind that you need a powerful computer with a lot of memory to deal with the extra data and compression. Pinnacle for example, recommends a minimum 512 MB of RAM and a graphics card with 128 MB of RAM for standard resolution video, although that goes up to a GB of RAM and a 256 MB graphics card when working with 1080i HD video.

You can find plenty of software available that supports editing high definition videos. For example, the latest versions of Pinnacle Studio and Ulead Media Studio 8 can import and edit files in HDV format.

Even though the high definition video with these types of looks great when played back on an HDTV, at the present time is there is no way store HD video on a DVD. The only way you can store HD video for playback is on your PC or the same type of media you used in your HD camcorder.

There is however, a new generation of high definition optical media format coming soon. Products that are based on the HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc formats are very expensive, and they will remain that way for the near future.

HD-DVD players were announced a while back that they will cost $500 and up, and will be available very soon. You’ll also need one of the new HD-DVD drives to write to the disc, which will cost as much again. You can expect the same story with the Blu-ray disc, as both the recorders and the players are going to be expensive for a while to come.

There is one other option as well. There is a DVD player from KISS, the DP-600, which can play back high definition files that have been compressed to Microsoft’s Windows Media 9 format. This can at least provide a stop gap until the price of the HD-DVD and Blue-ray disc players and writes come down to an affordable price.

You can always play back the recorded video you have through the camcorder itself, although you shouldn’t expect to be able to write it out on a disc with the current available equipment and preserve its quality. If you wait it out, the new generation of available media will be everything you need for your HD video.

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• High Definition Video Cameras