Looking for the Holy Grail

Question

I'm wondering what you guys and girls are using as fast storage for uncompressed hd work.
My company is looking for a solution that is reliable, but less expensive than an XRaid solution.
It can be raid0, raid5, raid10, I don't care, I just want to know what is working for you in your real world applications.
To be honest here, we're not currently doing uncompressed HD work, but are about to start doing some uncompressed SD and would like what we buy to be fast enough to step up into the HD realm if we can land some larger accounts.

Answer 1

I suppose we can agree to disagree. You've been on this forum for as long as I can remember. Furthermore, I basically agree with every thing else you post here so I don't want to get on your bad side.
The most important point that I believe has been overlooked is that broadcast and the future HD DVD (both standards) use the same or similar wide GOP MPEG or WMV compression that HDV uses. Sure stations may use D5 or HDCAM decks in the control room, but the actual HD broadcast is always downsampled. Most HD broadcasts are AT BEST 19mbit and usually much lower. And that's a 60P stream so 30P or 24P footage will only use half that bandwidth for active frames due to the pulldown. By the way, I believe JVC's HDV1 720P CODEC is superior in this regard because it devotes the entire bandwidth to active frames and uses a smaller GOP of 6 for better motion rendering. Even DVCProHD wastes over half of it's 100mbit bandwidth on inactive frames when shooting 24P or 30P. I have no experience with HDV2 1080i format but I suspect it also wastes some bandwidth in 24P modes on inactive frames due to it's pulldown pattern and uses a 12 frame GOP which would hurt motion rendering.
My impression of HDV1 720P is that the footage is very similiar to DVCPROHD even in high motion, but with a smaller colorspace. Human eyes don't see the lower colorspace in most cases and when transmitted over SDI, most systems can actually smooth the chroma channels making it even less noticable.
I don't agree that the subjective quality of an HDV image is below DV-25. Most panning artifacts are subject to camera settings. It's amazing how a shutter speed adjustment improves the look of such footage in 30P and 24P. Lowering sharpening really reduces motion artifacts. I suppose with a really crappy HDV camera such as the older JVC GRHD-1, one could say the image is inferior to DV, but but I don't think the format is subjectively inferior when shot correctly.
Yes, the same artifacting you describe is so rampant in HDV will be visible on broadcast, regardless of the quality of your source footage that you hand over to the station. Of course there are instances like I mentioned when it is best to edit in the highest quality format for color keying work or advanced color correction, and especially filmout.
However 95% of the time HD footage will be compressed at a rate that is lower and more destructive than HDV when viewed by an audience.
Am I wrong about any of this? Please correct me if so.