What is DVCPRO, DVCPRO50 and DVCPROHD ?
DVCPRO is a set of video codecs from Panasonic – DVCPRO and DVCPRO50 are both Standard Definition video (at 25mbps and 50mbps respectivly). DVCPRO-HD is a High definition codec which provides compressed HD at 100Mbps. DVCPRO50 and DVCPROHD use a 4:2:2 (YUV) colour space same as SDI and Digital Betacam. This means for every 4 pixels, half of the chroma (U and V colour information ) is thrown away which is difficult for mere humans to notice due to the way our visual processing works. PAL DV, HDV and DVD all use a 4:2:0 sampling scheme which is better described by 4:2:0, 4:0:2, 4:2:0, etc. where a quarter of the chroma information is available and allows for a more compressed signal..but at the cost of lower quality (this is fairly subjective).