Shane Ross runs the very fine blog: Little Frog in High Def, where he blogs about editing issues and technology. It’s one of my daily reads and you should definitely check it out.

Anyhow, in a recent post Shane goes off on a rant about the difficulties in working with HDV in a professional production environment. I personally thinks he sells the format short, he seems to have a real problem with some of the nitty gritty technical aspects such as capturing and workflow, and then goes on to dismiss the entire format out of hand as “unprofessional”.

I’m thinking he may have just had a bad capture day, but read his post and see if you agree with his observations.

Update: Shane’s taken down his original post, citing a bit of misplaced anger and frustration.

I was sitting here today pondering the end of tape, and what it means for video producers in the near future…

Now HDV certainly isn’t dead, and even MiniDV is still hanging on, I expect to see new models of both formats at CES next month. However I don’t think anyone will disagree with the statement that HDV will most likely be the last tape-based format that we see. New video recording formats in the future, will all be solid state.

Hastening the end-of-tape process is the fragmentation that seemed to happen in HDV, with each manufacturer adopting their own incompatible standards, progressive modes, and frame rates. For a while there the editing software programmers I talked to could be reduced to tears just by mentioning the phrase “HDV support”. MiniDV’s dominance of the SD format was so complete, it was easy to forget that cooperation and compatibility among camcorder manufacturers has always been the exception, rather than the norm.

So out of the chaos of various HD formats and media types (HDD, DVD, SDHC, P2, SxS etc.) where is the next MiniDV? Where is the standard that will be the unifying format for the next generation of camcorders? From where I sit now, all the stars seem aligning around AVCHD on SDHC cards. Broad support from manufacturers and a unifying media standard are beginning to emerge, and these models are one of the fastest growing camcorder segments this year.

That’s not to say AVCHD is not without it’s problems. It’s very difficult to decode, and you need a massively powerful computer to edit with it in real time (This was also true of MiniDV back in the day). But the main factor hobbling AVCHD at the moment is what to do with all your video once you fill up your card. I know the short answer is, put it on your hard drive, but then what? You then need some kind of practical media management system, including backups and RAIDs. And will you even be able to hook up your current hard drive to a computer ten years from now? What is the digital equivalent of the shoe-box full of tapes in the closet?

The real limiting factor of AVCHD at the moment is the cost of the media. You simply can’t afford to buy a new HDSC card for every shoot, like you would for tape. Once the price of 8-16 Gig HDSC cards (which allow 40-90 minutes of high quality bit-rate AVCHD) drops to video tape range, say $5-$10 per card we will see an explosion of AVCHD as a viable format. At that price people can afford to store their video on the very durable cards themselves and not rely on the fragility of their hard drives to hold their irreplacable footage.

From what I see now, AVCHD and SDHC are the future of consumer video. What do you see?