Technology and Innovation

Camcorder Conclusion
When deciding which HD camcorder to buy, consider whether you truly are a hobbyist or a prosumer. Many of the smaller HD camcorders are ideal for both, but prosumers may need the extra features found in the higher-end HD cams. Always keep your end needs in mind when choosing a camcorder. Happy shooting.

What do all the editing applications that support high definition video have in common? They all contain ways to capture HDV footage using an intermediate codec, changing the HDV footage to a more standard and universal high definition (HD) format, which is easier to edit with.
The reason is that HDV’s compression, which is very similar to how video is compressed for DVDs (MPEG-2 TS, or transport stream), is hard to cut natively on an edit system. This is why the manufacturers of most of the major editing software provide an intermediate codec or offer one as a plug-in. The footage encoded with the intermediate codec can be converted back to HDV upon playback to camera or VTR, though with uncompressed HD, the file sizes can easily quadruple.

There is a school of video asset organization that is comprised of a series of shoeboxes in the closet filled with random tapes. Hopefully, each tape has a label, probably hastily scribbled upon in the field. It doesn’t take long before such a system becomes unwieldy, reaching the point where locating clips takes up more time than editing.
Square Box Systems has come to the rescue with CatDV Pro. CatDV Pro creates and manages a searchable database of every clip that’s ever been digitized into your system. It can capture the clip’s metadata and thumbnail images, as well as a highly compressed preview movie. This allows you to view and store your assets, once your original footage has been taken offline.  The first step in organizing your footage is digitizing it into your computer. There are two ways of doing this with CatDV Pro. The first and most intuitive is to capture the entire tape in your editing software, then import that file into CatDV Pro. The second is to capture from within CatDV Pro itself. (This will require a third party VDIG driver if you’re on a PC, or the optional Live Capture Plus if you’re on a Mac.)
Bringing in a full length clip from Final Cut Pro was a snap, and the file imported easily into CatDV. The clips automatically separate into scenes using DV time stamp detection, or using CatDV’s own visual frame referencing algorithms. The DV detection was spot on, and the visual detection was remarkably close, requiring a tweaking of a few frames to get just right. However, it’s a huge help if you’re cataloging footage from analog sources. CatDV Pro can import and manipulate any QuickTime media codec, including QuickTime flavors of HDV and DVCPRO HD.

DVDit to It
The first menu you define or the first clip that you import into DVDit Pro HD becomes the first play by default, which is clearly marked with text and with a big green play arrow on the clip’s thumbnail. You can also choose; different first play clip later.
We found it easy to create our own menu from scratch—we dragged one of the rather sharp-looking background images provided with the software onto the menu, and then we we able to simply drag our clips directly onto the menu. This also defined a default set of highlights onto our new buttons and set a logical button routf order. You can also see the safe title/a tion area for both 4:3 and 16:9 screei
Once we burned the disc, our HD clips didn’t require much processing before they were ready to be burned Upon playback time, though, we fou: that the disc we created didn’t play in Corel InterVideo WinDVD for BD for Vaio, but it could be played with CyberLink’s PowerDVD Ultra. Howev we’ve had a number of odd little coc issues with this particular machine-your mileage may vary.
Overall, DVDit Pro HD is a very friendly but surprisingly powerful pre gram that will probably do anything t you’ll ever need to do as far as author ing DVD-Video or Blu-ray Disc… at lei until the next major authoring formal comes along

The first thing that the program asks when you start it is whether you want to create an NTSC or PAL project. If you’re just going to Blu-ray Disc, this question will seem quite strange on the surface, but the reason the program asks has to do with one of the line items on the box. The program includes the ability to write the same project to both Blu-ray Disc and DVD—a very useful feature that has the potential to save you a lot of time (depending on the scope of your disc authoring project, of course).
We found the process to bring assets into program a bit confusing at first. The File > Import > Media option seems a logical choice on the surface, but fails to bring in anything but still images. However, there’s also File > Add Movie. This is the one you want to use for bringing in your video clips. The program is also finicky about file extensions—we had some .m2t (MPEG-2 transport stream) files captured from a Sony HDR-FX7 HDV camcorder via Sony DVGate Plus that had to have their extensions changed to .mpg before we could import them.
The arrangement of the program in its default workspace (there are a few others to choose from) made immediate sense to us. The menu bar is arranged left-to-right in order of how you will be accessing the functions beneath (e.g., Timeline, DVD Menus, Simulate, Burn)

In the ongoing evolution of disc burning, we have reached the point where the latest major distribution hurdle has been overcome: the ability to burn your own full-length high-definition projects for people who don’t have computers. Roxio’s DVDit Pro HD is among the first Windows disc authoring tools that can make this claim.
The program welcomes all comers, particularly users of Roxio/Sonic’s own MyDVD, which allows projects made in that application to be opened and edited, giving users an easy upgrade path.
While all of the documentation notes that the program is designed for Windows XP (Home, Professional or Media Center Edition), we tested DVDit Pro HD on a Sony Vaio RM1 video editing computer running Windows Vista Business, and everything worked just fine.