On September 30, 2003, the HDV standard was
agreed on by four companies: Canon Inc., Sharp
Corporation, Sony Corporation, and the Victor
Company of Japan, Limited.
The concept of the HDV standard is to develop a
home camcorder, which can record easily high
quality HD movies. The HDV standard can be used
with existing DV tape as the recording media.
Thus, by using the mechanisms of a DV camcorder,
mitigation of development costs and
development efficiency is realized.
Feature No. 1: Recording HD images on DV tapes
The same videotapes used for DV recordings can
also be used for HD recordings, and the
recording time is also equivalent. Furthermore,
the main recording mechanisms are also the same
as for the DV standard.
Feature No. 2: MPEG-2 is used as the compression format.
The same MPEG-2 compression format that is used
for digital broadcasts and DVDs is also used
for HDV. Efficient compression is possible while
maintaining the high quality of HD images.
Therefore, using the same bit rate as for the DV
standard, the recording and playing back of high resolution
HD images has been realized. In order to use
MPEG-2 to compress the large quantity of
HD image data, which is much more than for the
SD format, an extremely large signal processing
circuit is required. However, due to the
advancement of semiconductors and signal processing
technology, it is now possible to use this
format as a standard for personal devices.
Feature No. 3: Powerful error correction capability
With the MPEG-2 format, which uses interframe
compression, the impact of missing data is much
greater than for the DV standard where
intraframe compression is used. For this reason, the
amount of correction coding has increased with
the HDV standard. Moreover, by turning the DV
correction method that only operates within
tracks into a correction method between multiple tracks,
error correction capability has been drastically
improved, and the tolerance for data loss in tracks
caused by dropouts is greatly enhanced.
Feature No. 4: Same
sound quality as a CD
MPEG-1 Audio Layer II is used for the audio
compression format, allowing you to enjoy the same
sound quality as from a CD.
Feature No. 5: Two kinds of recording systems
The HDV standard has two types of recording
systems: the 720p (progressive) specification and
the 1080i (interlace) specification.
