HD is upon us. In the blink of an eye everything has changed. Now there are affordable HD cameras and decks with the promise of many more to come.

It's 1996 all over again that's when DV arrived. Now we have HDV, a entry-level format which uses a highly compressed HD signal to create the DV equivalent of the HD world.

Photo: Mickey K. May

And it doesn't stop there. Beyond HDV is DVCPro HD and beyond that is top-of-the-range HDCam.

The world mimics itself over and over, again and again, creating format after format, catering to every budget with a miriad of possible shooting possibilities.

Standard def. will be phased out, just like CP16's, Steenbecks and Moviolas. The low end of the HD playing field produces images which look more like those of the high end of yesterday. The top end of production means shooting video which is good enough for cinema projection.

Yet with the leap in technology Final Cut Pro looks much the same, though open up the hood the engine has suped up for something very much twenty first century.

Now there is Multicam built right inside of Final Cut Pro is the equivant of a live studio switcher. Cut up to 16 camera angles at a time, all running simultaneously. Compressor 2 gives each and everyone of us a standard converter: changes formats from PAL to NTSC, NTSC to PAL, HD to SD, encode to H.264. Capture up to 24 channels of multichannel audio and work with...