Question about Bit Rate and Quality

[T375]

Hi All

I am trying to understand how quality in playback/capture from a video camera is determined. OK, we have DV tape that has a bit rate of 25Mbps and HD also has a bit rate in this vincinity.... Now, I have a camcoder that I bought in 2005 that captures video onto DV tape. Why is there a marked difference between the capture quality of todays video cameras that capture at 25Mbps and those made in 2005 that capture at 25MBps? Is it to do with the image processing in the camera and not the bit rate?

Thanks
T375

[Baldrick]

Different video compression formats. HD cameras are compressing the video more so even with much higher resolution you can keep the bitrate at same or lower then standard DV.

AVCHD cameras uses h264 compression.
HDV cameras uses mpeg2 compression,
Standard DV uses a much less compressed format(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DV#DV_Compression ).

[jagabo]

Note that, other things being equal, DV has higher quality within its frame size than does HDV. If you were to look at 720x576 portion of the HDV video at the same size as the 720x576 DV video, the DV video would have fewer compression artifacts.

[yoda313]

@jagabo - does that mean to say prior generations of dv would do sd better than current dv based high def models?

I would imagine that anyone getting hdv would get it for the high def ability and not standard def recording.

[jagabo]

@jagabo - does that mean to say prior generations of dv would do sd better than current dv based high def models?

I would imagine that anyone getting hdv would get it for the high def ability and not standard def recording.

I think there are too many differences in technology to make generalized claims one way or another.