Richard Hernandez13 said:It is my firm belief that recorders and hard drives integrated into DVD players ought to support real-time recording capabilities. It is a basic necessity.
How much quality can we actually expect from these modern recorders?
Is there some sort of compromise being made between recording speeds and image quality?
Technology continues its relentless march forward, yet I find myself thinking that we aren't even facing any significant hurdles as it stands.
Modern devices equipped with an HDD now feature time-shifting capabilities. This essentially means that while a program is still being recorded, you can already begin watching what has been captured. Furthermore, they offer on-screen editing tools for your recorded material, which you can eventually burn onto a DVD.
Everything out there offers far superior alternatives to VHS. The only real issue is that many of us simply aren't used to it; people struggle to believe that the whole process is actually much simpler than they think. When you factor in that a standard DVD now costs about the same as an old VHS tape—and considering we can record significantly more footage onto an HDD depending on the quality and capacity—VHS just doesn't stand a chance anymore.
It’s only a matter of time—give it a year or two, maybe less—but the distribution of VHS films is going to grind to a complete halt. It's inevitable.
If we push this line of thinking even further, what year are we actually looking at—maybe 2006 or 2007—for when Blu-ray and HD-DVD finally hit the shelves here in the States? We're talking about formats with capacities around 30GB that will actually carry high-definition footage. It might be the moment we finally experience true digitalization.
The fundamental issue remains that even with today's hardware, the entire system hasn't truly achieved full digitalization yet.
The reality of our setup is somewhat underwhelming. Most of the footage we capture—and frankly, most of the cameras used in filmmaking in general—is primarily analog, with the exception of digital satellite broadcasts. However, even those digital signals aren't truly digital by the time they reach us. Our satellite receivers lack any legitimate digital outputs; instead, they provide standard analog RCA connections. This means the signal is forced through a D/A converter before it ever hits our gear. From there, we feed those analog inputs into a system that records onto a digital DVD format. Consequently, we aren't achieving a true full-path digital transfer. It is, quite simply, a loss in quality.
The digital revolution finally arrived this year with the introduction of HDMI devices. Specifically, we saw the debut of the first HDMI DVD player, the Pioneer 868, alongside the first HDMI-compatible display, the Pioneer plasma PDP-HD404.
HDMI It is finally happening. After more than two decades of being stuck with the limitations of SCART, we are seeing a global standard that actually moves us forward—a fully digital transfer for both audio and video capable of handling massive amounts of data. Up until this point, our only options for purely digital transfers were DVI, which is strictly video-only, or FireWire via i.Link, which could handle both audio and video for DV camcorders. However, both of those standards fall short because they simply lack the necessary bandwidth to sustain a high-quality signal. For instance, FireWire tops out at 400 Mbit/s, which is barely enough to push through basic television resolution. We need more.
That is precisely why we have HDMI. With a bandwidth reaching up to 5 Gbps—which, if you think about it, is roughly ten times faster than a standard HDD—it provides the necessary headroom to handle high-definition video and audio from next-gen media like HD-DVD and Blu-ray. It’s also designed to accommodate those high-definition TV signals that have already been broadcasting here in the US and over in Japan for several years now. As for Europe, they should be seeing similar transitions around 2006.
The role of legacy FireWire is finally shifting toward high-end digital music transfer. For much of the last decade—that awkward transition period from analog to digital—we’ve relied on coaxial or optical connections. Honestly, those have always provided enough bandwidth for standard CD players or even Dolby Digital and DTS tracks on a DVD. But let’s face it: the era of the basic CD is dying. We are moving into the age of Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio, which demand true high-definition sound. Up until now, you were pretty much stuck using analog connections to hear that level of detail, but starting this year, we are seeing FireWire integrated for digital signal transfer. It’s an ideal solution.
And just like that, we are witnessing the total transition to a full-digital workflow. It’s happening right before our eyes. Back in 2001, Pitof shot the first entirely HDD-based film—not a single scrap of tape used—captured on a digital camera, titled *Vidocq*. Later, in 2002, they went ahead and transferred it onto standard tape. The editing was handled on an Apple Mac G4. A strange era, really. Moving from physical reels to bits and bytes... quite a shift.
Back in 2002, George Lucas released Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, which stands as the first true digital Hollywood production. His original intention was to bypass analog film entirely, but he was ultimately forced to concede. It turns out that even here in the States—let alone across the rest of the world—there simply weren't enough fully digital theaters available to make such a move commercially viable at the time.
The avalanche has officially begun. Once DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and HDTV become deeply ingrained in our American consumer habits—and once movie theaters finally finish their modernization—we’re going to see the systematic recording of digital films.
As the right technology becomes available (think full-path digital A/V receivers, Sony already has one for about $27 $0.00, along with HDMI-equipped HD LCD and Plasma screens, projectors, and eventually DVD/Blu-ray players), I can say with some confidence that we are entering an era where we can experience all media, whether audio or video, exactly as it was intended in the studio. No loss, no compromise.