MORE - Broadcast Formats
Recording Tape Brnads

The DV formats tabulated: link to Adam Wilt's great site - be sure to visit
 

Pre-Digital Formats	High-8VHS, SVHS, VHS-C
Consumer SD	Pro- SD	High Definiton
Digital 8		HD	P2
DV	DVCAM	HDV  (HDV1 + HDV2)
DVC  (mini-DV)	DVCPro (25)
	DVCPro(50)	DVCProHD (100)
	BETA-SP
	DigiBeta
	Varicam

DVCAM

Sony's DVCAM is a professional variant of the DV standard that uses the same cassettes as DV and MiniDV, but transports the tape 50% faster. This leads to a higher track width of 15 micrometres. This variant uses the same codec as regular DV. However, the greater track width lowers the chances of dropout errors. The LP mode of consumer DV is not supported. All DVCAM recorders and cameras can play back DV material, but DVCPRO support was only recently added to some models like DSR-1800, DSR-2000, DSR-1600. DVCAM tapes (or DV tapes recorded in DVCAM mode) have their recording time reduced by one third.

DVCPRO

Panasonic specifically created the DVCPRO family for electronic news gathering (ENG) use, with better linear editing capabilities and robustness. It has an even greater track width of 18 micrometres and uses another tape type (Metal Particle instead of Metal Evaporated). Additionally, the tape has a longitudinal analog audio cue track. Audio is only available in the 16 bit/48 kHz variant, there is no EP mode, and DVCPRO always uses 4:1:1 color subsampling (even in PAL mode). Apart from that, standard DVCPRO (also known as DVCPRO25) is otherwise identical to DV at a bitstream level. However, unlike Sony, Panasonic chose to promote its DV variant for professional high-end applications.

DVCPRO50 is often described as two DV-codecs in parallel. The DVCPRO50 standard doubles the coded video bitrate from 25 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s, and uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling instead of 4:1:1. DVCPRO50 was created for high-value ENG compatibility. The higher datarate cuts recording time in half (compared to DVCPRO25), but the resulting picture quality is reputed to rival Digital Betacam.

DVCPRO HD, also known as DVCPRO100, uses four parallel codecs and a coded video bitrate of approximately 100 Mbit/s, depending on the format flavour. DVCPRO HD encodes using 4:2:2 color sampling. DVCPRO HD prefilters the 720p image from the DSP to a recorded size of 960x720, and 1080i is prefiltered to 1280x1080 for 59.94i and 1440x1080 for 50i. This is a common technique, utilized in most tape-based HD formats such as HDCam and HDV. The final DCT compression ratio is approximately 6.7:1. To maintain compatibility with HDSDI, DVCPRO100 equipment upsamples video during playback. A camcorder using a special variable-framerate (from 4 to 60 frame/s) variant of DVCPRO HD called VariCam is also available. All these variants are backward compatible but not forward compatible. There is also a DVCPRO HD EX format, which runs the tape at slower speed, resulting in twice as long recording times. DVCPRO-HD is codified as SMPTE 370M; the DVCPRO-HD tape format is SMPTE 371M, and the MXF Op-Atom format used for DVCPRO-HD on P2 cards is SMPTE 390M.

DVCPRO cassettes are always labeled with a pair of run times, the smaller of the two being the capacity for DVCPRO50. A "M" tape can hold up to 66/33 minutes of video. The color of the lid indicates the format: DVCPRO tapes have a yellow lid, longer "L" tapes made specially for DVCPRO50 have a blue lid and DVCPRO HD tapes have a red lid. The formulation of the tape is the same, and the tapes are interchangeable between formats. The running time of each tape is 1x for DVCPRO, 2x for DVCPRO 50, 2x for DVCPRO HD EX, and 4x for DVCPRO HD, since the tape speed changes between formats. Thus a tape made 126 minutes for DVCPRO will last approximately 32 minutes in DVCPRO HD.