The home moviemaker faces an increasingly difficult problem: what do you do with your new high definition home movie? TViX PVRs have the answer.
Of course, many people continue to be happy with standard definition home video. Good on them, we say. They can edit their video and burn DVDs for sharing with family and friends.
But for an increasing number of home video enthusiasts, standard definition video is no longer good enough. Even with a very high quality video camera, the shortcomings of standard definition quickly become apparent on any modern LCD or plasma TV screen above 107 cm in size.
Burning edited HD home movies to disc for viewing on the big screen in the lounge room is an involved and expensive process, but TViX PVRs make it simple and convenient
At the same time as bigger TVs are coming into our homes, high definition home video is becoming affordable, with a number of high quality consumer level formats available from the likes of Panasonic, Sony and JVC. Once the video has been captured you could, of course, just plug the video camera into your high definition TV and watch the recording as originally captured. Unfortunately, watching unedited video isn’t very compelling. Unedited video footage typically doesn’t tell a good, coherent story, and it’s certainly not movie making.
Fortunately, high definition cameras include facilities for transferring your video to a computer, and there are plenty of excellent editing suites on all kinds of computers which can be used to cut and reorganise the video into a highly professional result.
But that’s where the problem begins. You can’t burn high definition video to DVD. Well you can, sort of, but only as a computer-type file. Not as playable video.
So what do you do? The obvious solution is to purchase a Blu-ray burner for your computer. Or perhaps this isn’t so obvious.
First, Blu-ray burners presently cost around a thousand dollars. And once you’ve purchased one, you need to feed itwith recordable Blu-ray discs. These will set you back about $20 each! We expect that discs and burners will come down in price in the future, but for the moment it makes a very expensive undertaking.
And then you need a Blu-ray player to watch the video. The current price leader is around $600.
TViX and HD home movies
A cheaper solution comes from the TViX PVRs. Copy your edited high definition masterpiece over to the 5130 or 4130 and watch it in full high definition on the big screen in your living room. Both units can output the video at any resolution, all the way up to the highest current standard: 1080p (where ‘p’ stands for progressive scan). These units support both the AVCHD and the HDV video formats used by high definition video cameras.
So just leave the video there on your TViX, or copy it to an attached USB external hard disk drive, and you can watch it in its high definition glory whenever you want.
Best of all, in a few years when you can buy a Blu-ray burner for a hundred dollars, a Blu-ray player for $150, and recordable Blu-ray discs are only two dollars each, you will be able to transfer these high definition masterpieces back to your computer from the TViX units and burn them to disc.
