Shoot 60p with intent to deliver 30p?

[KeithAndrews.TV]

I have recently shot a bunch of footage with the HMC150 using the 720/60p setting. My editing workflow has been to edit in a 60p timeline and export as 60p as well, which has yielded great results. Now I am not a huge fan of the 60p look and would much prefer the look of 30p. That being said, I have tried to export my 60p footage as 30p and I get this ghosting whenever there is movement in the frame. I assume it is just the software blending the two frames together to produce one new frame, but unfortunately it is not a very pleasing look. The majority of the work I do involves a steadicam, or a moving camera, so I would like to be able to use 60p as my primary acquisition frame rate, because of the cleaner images it produces. However, I would also like to be able to take the 60p footage and deliver in 30p for the look. Is there something I should be doing differently to get better results if I still choose to shoot 60p for the majority of my shoots? Keep in mind, I do use the 60p to create cleaner 50% slow-mo on occasion. I just want my finished product to be 30p. Thanks for your help!

[mcsmooth]

This really depends on the software you are using. For example, in Premiere, there is a "frame blend" option that you would want to turn off in situations like this. However, this option is done on the timeline, I don't know if you can simply set it for the entire poject or export. On that note, you usually want to be editing your project in the format you want to export to or you may have trouble seeing and controlling how it will translate. Not sure if you have 720p30 as an option.

In the future, try using 30p on shots you intend to keep that way, it may solve the problems you are having and give you more control over the shutter. You can also shoot 60p at a 1/30 shutter, but I doubt you would want to shoot that way all the time.

[ecking]

Unless you're trying to make your entire piece slo-mo it doesn't really make much sense to shoot nothing but 60p and force it all into a 30p, that would create nothing but 50% slow motion. What you would need to do is use an opentime conform the parts you want to be slo-mo into 30p clips with something like cinematools, and leave the rest at 60p. But if you want it all to be 30p and some parts to be slow, the best way is just to shoot at 30p and that parts you want to be slo-mo in the post, shoot those 60p. 60p to 30p will always create slow motion unless you're trying to tell your software to throw away every second frame, which makes no sense to me. I'm not even sure if that can be done sensibly without making all your footage look strange.

[KeithAndrews.TV]

Yeah, unfortunately I don't think those options are going to work for me. I typically slow the footage down at varying intervals for a stylistic touch and I wouldn't be able to shoot 60p for some things and 30p for others simply because I'm shooting long, continuous takes with a Steadicam. It's sort of one or the other.

I guess I was looking for a solution where the software would omit every other progressive frame effectively converting 60p to 30p, but maintaining the temporal space of the footage. I really would like to shoot in 60p due to the fact that the DRS function of the HMC150 only works with that framerate.

I guess if I shot everything in 60p, copied the footage and conformed that copied footage to 30p, I could then edit the majority of my video in a 30p timeline with the 30p copied footage, preserving the look I want, but then on the shots I wanted slowed down, I could refer back to the original 60p footage and slow that down 50% preserving the extra data that was recorded.

The question now is where would I get the software to effectively do the conversion from 60p to 30p, or what settings do I use in Premiere to essentially perform the same conversion?? I use a PC so I'll have to check out Procoder 3.0, or some other software out there to see if they are capable of doing this.

[mcsmooth]

Did you try a 30p project yet and turn off frame blend for clips on the timeline? Works for me in Premiere and will still allow you to do the same slow motion.

[pailes]

Haven't got my HMC150 yet, but I will be having similar issues. I will mainly be shooting action sports and I plan to use 50 fps (PAL country) exclusively and drop everything onto a 25 fps timeline later. It should be no issue as long as you can switch off frame blending for the speed variations just like mcsmooth said. Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, they can all be used for these tasks.

[douchebro]

before knowinu about frame blending i was using the interpret command in premiere. right click on the clip in the clip window and you'll see it. change it to the frame rate you would like and bam, easy as pie!

[KeithAndrews.TV]

Hey guys, thanks for all the helpful replies. Turning "Frame Blending" off did in fact improve the frame rate playback quality significantly. I read up on it a bit more and Adobe said that you would really only use "Frame Blending" if you were placing clips of one frame rate into a timeline of a different frame rate. Then again, others said that it did not produce that great an image, and I would have to agree.

I did manage to finish my last edit of 60p footage in a 60p timeline, this time with no slow-mo, exported from my 60p timeline as a 60p video file, imported the 60p video file into a new 30p timeline and dechecked "Frame Blending" and it gave me exactly the look I was going for. Frame for frame it was perfect 30p.

Now, going forward, if I wanted to slow down some 60p footage, I would actually want to start in a 30p timeline with frame blending turned off on the 60p footage and then slow down the 60p where ever I wanted and still be able to get the clean slow mo I was shooting for.

I believe if you edit 60p in a 60p timeline and try to slow that footage down, you are not going to see the same benefits as you would if you were to take the 60p footage and edit it in a 30p timeline. It would be the same as editing 30p footage in a 30p timeline and then slowing that footage down 50%. It wouldn't produce the same results. The benefit of using 60p for slow mo is only visible when you have more frames available than the timeline you are working with.

[mcsmooth]

Hey guys, thanks for all the helpful replies. Turning "Frame Blending" off did in fact improve the frame rate playback quality significantly. I read up on it a bit more and Adobe said that you would really only use "Frame Blending" if you were placing clips of one frame rate into a timeline of a different frame rate. Then again, others said that it did not produce that great an image, and I would have to agree.
Good to hear that helped. Frame blending only takes effect if it is in a different frame rate, and unfortunately is enabled by default all the time. I used to like it a lot with interlaced footage, but have not found it so useful with progressive.


I believe if you edit 60p in a 60p timeline and try to slow that footage down, you are not going to see the same benefits as you would if you were to take the 60p footage and edit it in a 30p timeline. It would be the same as editing 30p footage in a 30p timeline and then slowing that footage down 50%. It wouldn't produce the same results. The benefit of using 60p for slow mo is only visible when you have more frames available than the timeline you are working with.
The slow motion will look exactly the same both ways, it is the regular motion that will look different. Our eyes might notice that the frame rate has slowed down, but the average user is concentrating on the slow motion, not the frame rate. They do this with sports on TV all the time, it isn't that noticeable until it really slows down or you can see still frames. When you dip below 24p, things start to look choppy. 30p at 50% will be jerky without frame interpolation.

douchebro, forgot about the interpret footage feature. That would be useful too, especially with a big file that will be cut up.

[KeithAndrews.TV]

Yes, I stand corrected. It is logical that shooting 60p and slowing it down 50% in a 60p timeline would yield the same results as taking 60p footage and slowing it down 50% in a 30p timeline. The constant is the framerate. The more frames you have to play with, the sharper motion will look when slowed down, regardless of what the framerate of your timeline is. Again, thanks for the responses. Sometimes I just need to throw stuff out there to work through it.