We’ve been thinking of options for purchasing camcorders for a while and amongst other questions I was thinking was the move to HD video actually worth it.
BECTA’s done quite a helpful article on it here. It puts some useful numbers on the topic but I think the general advice is there are too many problems with moving data round the network. Basically, the size of the files needed to work in HD are MASSEEEEEV! and are likely to reduce your servers to blancmange if you try to do it on the network.
The simple solution is to use the biggest, most powerful PC you can get your hands on in school and work on your HD project off the hard drive. Not always easy if your systems manager has locked users out of making changes to the local machine but it’s worth negotiating with them to find a solution. Our systems guys have installed a product called Deep Freeze on our network which preserves a machines settings to prevent any tinkering (rebooting a machine sets everything back to a pre-ordained point) and it also give you a partition of the hard drive you can save to called Thawspace. It’s neat.
The other question you should ask yourself is why do we we need HD? Not many people can actually watch it at home and rendered HD videos still take up a fair bit of room. Also what’s the educational value of doing something in HD rather than standard definition? The process of making an HD project is pretty much the same for normal DV, although you might engage students more in something they see as being “prestige” and cutting edge.
In short, is spending time and resources on adapting your systems to HD actually going to be worth the expense?
For us, that answer is still no for anything other than landmark projects.
2 Comments until now
I agree. I have worked in the Broadcast industry for 20 years as a cameraman and now have turned my experience to the development of media rich training recourses, of which video is becoming a large part. I am in the process of re kitting the production and design department of e-lbs.com a company who creates hi quality interactive content. They have been shooting and cutting on SD (standard diff) (DV and IMX) broadcast equipment, however, as replacement of production equipment is required, it makes sense to purchase HD. However, the deployment of HD content is a different matter. I have employed compression measures (H264) being my preferred option for all video content. My point is by the time you have reduced the frame size of HD video to be usable as a down loaded resources, are you really seeing any benefit in it over deployment of SD video when it comes to file size? I am conduction test to establish the opinion of the end user (the learners) on this topic.
My thought are that at this stage, there are no outstanding benefits to HD video in e-learning.However, I still need to prove this to myself.
Thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed response, Nick.
It’s really good to get the technical specialist viewpoint.
My worry since writing this is that it is increasingly difficult to stay in the SD arena, especially with consumer kit as manufacturers are all abandoning it in favour of the more lucrative HD Market.
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