What good is a blog if it isn’t opinionated and biased in some way?   Not very good at all in my opinion, which is all that matters here because this is my blog.

Here is MY top 5 reasons you should never use SD again

NUMBER 1:  HD just looks sexier, and everyone can see it. (even my Grandmother)

While the high end HD market keeps pushing the limits of what consumers can/will buy in HD.  There is no question that SD is a thing of the past.  I recently sat down with my grandmother in front of her new HDTV.  She could tell the difference right away, and she’s 84 years old.  People who tell you they can’t see a difference  between SD and HD are either blind, stupid, or not really paying attention.

Take a look at this sample:  It’s apples and oranges

NUMBER 2:  Cable companies are scrambling to add more HD channels all the time.

If you have checked in with this blog before, you’ve seen the entries I’ve done on all the new HD content that is being offered by cable and satellite companies.  Believe me when I tell you, they aren’t out there trying to see what new SD channels can eat up their bandwidth.  Eventually there will be more HD channels than SD channels, this may be decades from now, but I know for a fact that SD is on the outs.

NUMBER 3:  SD is not futureproof

If you are pumping a good amount of money into a production of any sort, you are doing yourself a GREAT disservice if you don’t shoot it in HD.  Granted…every production is different, and each production has different needs, but if you are planning to produce something which you want to use as a marketing tool for many years, shooting it in SD today is not only a mistake, it’s a gargantuan waste of your time and money.  You can alwaysconvert an HD source down to an SD dvd.   But you can never make SD source look anything by grainy and artifacty when you try to bump it up to HD.

NUMBER 4:  Even if you want an SD master, HD just looks better.

I sort of covered this in the last point.  If you shoot in HD you are getting more information.  Typically you have a higher resolution, better colors, better contrast.  Overall it’s just a far superrior format, HD does SD better than SD ever could.  Hell, I’ll even go as far as to say that a top of the line betacam can’t really even beat out the consumer level HDV cameras that are out there.  The picture-quality and resolution just can’t be beat.  You always want to oversample in production if you can help it.

NUMBER 5:  You don’t want people to laugh at you.

If you hang out with even 1 tech-gadget geek like me, if you don’t have a HDtv, belive me, they are laughing at you, and making observant and cruel remarks behind your back.