All Oktober Films projects from mid-2005 onwards are shot in HD, regardless of budget. There is still no mainstream medium to play HD. Blu-Ray players are few and far between and authoring is kept in the hands of the big studios for the time being. HD TVs are few and far between and some are not even Full HD. So why bother? Because our projects should live on. They must be future-proof. Although current projects are delivered in SD (standard definition) that will play on every TV, the possibility of re-editing the footage in HD later is there and ensures that whatever we produce today will not be rejected later because it is lacking in (image) quality. YouTube recently started broadcasting in HD and we are working on getting our projects online in the best possible quality.
To give some idea of what the difference between SD and HD is, here are some figures. SD PAL (Europe) is 720x576 pixels. NTSC (USA) is 720x480. HD is 1920x1080 or 1280x720. The camera above, the one used on our projects, captures images in 1440x1080. Those images are then stretched (similar to today's widescreen TVs) to fit on full resolution TV and will be displayed in full HD, 1920x1080. Bottom line is, the image is pin sharp (unless I forget to focus) and every project can be shown anywhere.
