znfjyku's Profile

Let's face it, right now, February 2005 - iMovie with 'HD' is marketing. iMovie is consumer software right? But then again the HDR-FX1 from sony is a 'consumer' camera. It really is. It's just expensive, and so it's out of the reach of most consumers but they have recently released a big brother model - the HVR-ZIU which records to MiniDV and DVCAM and has more features [and is of course even more expensive]. Actually neither does 'true' HD - which is 1920 pixels wide like Apple's 23in Cinema Display but they do have the critical 1080 lines of horizontal interlaced resolution - so they can call themselves '1080i'. And of course if you want Sony can provide you with a George Lucas style CineAlta, but that will set you back many many FX1's. The HDV format is great for many reasons but one of key end results of its compression technology is that you can get HD bandwidth from your camera through 'plain old' firewire. Apple is doing 'consumers' a favour by giving us the tools to have a homebrewed HD _workflow_. It's the same attitude that allows 'consumers' to maintain a RAW image workflow [now] with iPhoto. I haven't read the fine print to know about know how well [or not] iMovie does compression but its a step in the right direction. The fact is that Apple's so-called consumer products are used by all levels of people up to the top professionals. OK, Star Wars wasn't shot on HDV but 'HD' in all its flavours is fast becoming _the_ standard for all video. HDTV is probably doing the most to drive it into the mainstream. So I'm happy that an iMovie HD is available. If your wallet and your CPU can handle it, shoot it high and downsample to whatever you need - be it DVD or a quicktime stream on the web. Before long you will be glad that you have got the 'originals' to crank all the way up when nothing less will do.