Question about t4i video resolution

[rjcarr316]

I recently purchased a t4i as an upgrade to my xti and I'm liking everything about it. My question is about video resolutions; it lets you pick from 1920x1080, 1280x720, and then ... 640x480?

I don't need to shoot HD quality video (and don't want the burden of keeping around all the HD content). So SD is fine for me, but why not 850x480 (or whatever the 16:9 equivalent is)? Is there anything I can do to get 480p (in the camera instead of post processed)?

 

[ARShutterbug]

It's because the SD resolution isn't 16:9. You either want HD or SD, and they're different aspect ratios. When I reduce the resolution to SD from HD, the video maintains its HD aspect ratio, but you have to go through the editing in HD before exporting to SD.

What you should be doing is saving all of the HD files to your scratch drive, editing, and then exporting a full-resolution file for storage and a desired-resolution file for distribution. Unless your camera manual suggests that you can do otherwise, you're stuck with doing the work yourself, or buying an SD camcorder instead.

 

[falconmick]

I can't answer for certain, but you might find that the resolution size is due to hardware constraints, i.e. how the camera recieves the light on the cmos, during video not all the data gathered from the cmos is recoreded, it only uses parts (like a checker patern on the sensor) of the data (which is why you get those funny lines on stripes when you move the scene around, I forget what it's called) so you might find to evenly gather data of of the sensor you can only have that resolution... Once again, I don't actually know the answer, but it's a weird format seeings though 1080/720p are in 16:9 so its all I can guess that would make sense...




May I recomend just shooting in 720p... It means that you will be forsed to be organised and properly store your video and organise it... This will make editing and ordering of your videos after a few months allot easier and you can always downsize 720 to 480p (16:9) at a later point once you've found the footage you wish to keep... You can't upsize 480p (without obviously loosing quality)!!!

 

[falconmick]

hmm, haha didn't see your response... I won't delete my post though, that way maybe somebody can correct my theory or just say it's plain wrong.

 

[RedFox88]

ARShutterbug wrote:

It's because the SD resolution isn't 16:9. You either want HD or SD, and they're different aspect ratios. When I reduce the resolution to SD from HD, the video maintains its HD aspect ratio, but you have to go through the editing in HD before exporting to SD.

Where did you make this up? DVD movie resolution is generally 720x480 aka wide screen movies. There's no reason it can't be made an option in dSLRs for recording - or evenin P&S cameras.