Originally Posted by MikeVega

I don't shoot but I've spoken to a few people that do and I feel after talking with them, it's better to shoot in HD. Even if your not going to render it in HD now you may want to in the future as more and more people have the ability to watch HD on their PC's. You may also want to use it on HD DVD at some point. It will give more shelf life to the content.

That's just the way I see it and it will be interesting to see what others think.

Originally Posted by MarkTiarra

From what I can see monitoring stats over sites with and without, it's just something that helps sales. What you get online is rarely true HD anyway (people take it and compress it down and don't use the full size) but it still often looks nicer than the stuff shot standard. If you keep the original DV you can always post up the higher quality version of the file that is for real HD when that becomes a viable option too (kinda what Mike said about better shelf life).

At the end of the day if it helps sales it's the way to go and every indication I have is that it does. Forget the arguments about whether it's worth it or not. Webmasters know far more about the minutia than their surfers do and they can think themselves out of a profitable choice because of it sometimes.

Originally Posted by jim_gunn

Dean, it's senseless to film anything in standard definition anymore. Every company I produce content for- both online and for offline wants hi-definition. It's mostly for marketing purposes, since they can all advertise "High Definition" on their tours for example. And don't forget, surfers will start to expect hi-def more and more, even if they only know by the wide screen aspect ratio.

Going forward, you or your clients will be able to repurpose those videos for HD-DVD, Blue-Ray or tv broadcast which you won't easily be able to do with SD footage.

The most economical way to get into hi-def is with an hdv camera like the the Sony FX-1. There are many easy desktop editing solutions for HDV. And a fast computer like the Core 2 Duo series will at let be able to encode the finished video files at a reasonable pace, although still much, much slower than than standard def.

True HD cameras that record to P2 cards or hard drives are starting to become much more affordable, but it takes a LOT more computer processing power and hard drives like Raid setups to edit and render these files. There is a very small difference in the attributes of HD vs hdv, such as the 4:2:2 colorspace but its hardly worth it for the extra expense and trouble just to film porn, especially for the web since the end product is extremely compressed anyway. So unless you are producing something that is really high end or you have a lot of money and time to spend on mastering the technology ,an hdv is probably the way to go, like the Sony or newer Panasonic cameras.