Of all the standards for interconnecting A/V devices, HDMI has emerged as among the most interesting. You can now have a single cable that handles both full-bandwidth audio and video bitstreams, switch among them with ease (depending on your equipment) and have less clutter and theoretically less capital expenditure on cables when you get your dream system put together (depending on whose cables you buy and where you buy them; and a lot of claims made by cable manufacturers are hooey.) And our paranoid (but nice) Hollywood friends love HDMI because they can have compliant devices add HDCP copy protection to the bitstreams.

Here’s the part that confuses: there’s actually little need for most people to go past HDMI 1.3c as far as cables and devices go, even though the HDMI 1.4 standard now exists. (Breakdown of features) The highlights: the HDMI 1.3a through 1.3c family of standards added support for controlling A/V equipment, building on the biggest HDMI 1.3 features of deep color, xvYCC color support, auto lip-sync, and support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master audio (as you’d find on many Blu-ray Disc titles.) HDMI 1.4 adds things that are neat but pretty much unnecessary for most of us: ethernet, audio return, 3D and 4K video. Ethernet could have a place, but anything that really needs to be on your network probably already has Wi-Fi built in. We don’t know how or why audio return would be helpful, really. 3D is fun a couple of times but is a bit of a headache to view for long periods of time, if you ask me. 4K sounds very cool… but ah, we just spent a small fortune on this otherwise-perfect 1080p set… it’s gonna have to last. That, and can anyone think of a 4K source you can buy today other than a RED camera? BZZZZ! Time’s up!

So where does this leave you, the humble video producer? Well, you know that spiffy new AVCHD camcorder you just bought? Just make sure the HDMI cable you keep in your gear bag for playing your rough cuts for your clients works between your camcorder and at least one display device, and theoretically, you shouldn’t have any trouble connecting to other display devices. (At least HDMI is more interoperable than a lot of other standards; it’s not like trying to find the magical DVD player that plays any disc, or the magical HDV player that can play any HDV tape, regardless of what kind of camcorder recorded it.)