720 30p vs 60p

V

vfranke

Member
After months of research and reading here just ordered the hvx200! Thanks for all the great reading! As I plan some testing, I wanted to get some other opinions on how 30p deals with motion. Shooting 30PN in some cases would save a lot of logistics, but I don't want to trade off image quality to do so. Please let me know if i have missed old threads, but my searches produced nothing.

I work mostly on nature docs and am not going for the film look, but wanting to capture events as realistically as possible. I would appreciate peoples thoughts on the folowing scenarios- i know its subjective:)

- Biologist walking and talking

- Jib shots of nature scenics- a dolly past wildlfower meadow etc.

- Birds in flight ( I am pretty sure i need to shoot this in 60p, but curious of others efforts and results)

One more Q, can I mix 30p and 60p on one timeline in the most recent versio of FCP?

Thanks!
 
Your delivery medium will also often dictate framerates -- if you are going to produce a SD DVD or broadcast, then there is no point in shooting more than 25 or 30fps unless you are trying to get a slow-motion effect.
 
Thanks....Being new to HD, I have not heard " if going to SD DVD, no need to shoot 60p" So this is a potentially dumb question, but...Can you tell me why and incase I want to capture something in 60p for a future use, would it hurt anything on the current project when I dump it to a SD DVD?

Thanks!
 
This was the first I have heard of "if going to a SD DVD, no need to shoot 60p" What happens to 60p in the pulldown to a SD DVD. It is fine to capture now at 60p, it's just all of the frames won't make it into the SD DVD right? I mean, shooting 60p won't look any worse that 30p will on a SD DVD right?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Sorry to post again, but it's either a really stupid question or got lost in the weekend traffic!

Thanks
 
If your NLE understands 60p, then it is also going to be able to handle the pulldown correctly, so you can shoot 60p with an eye towards creating an HD version in the future even if you only need a SD DVD today.

My point was that if you only need SD DVD, then shooting 60p greatly increases storage requirements and creates extra work to handle pulldown.
 
Shoot 24pN and edit 24p....
DVD SP understands 24p....
On HVX you can shoot 60 fps in 24p, achieving slo-mo effect.
60 fps in 24p is different than shooting 60p.....
Only need to shoot 60p with HVX if a broadcaster asks for it....
 
Perhaps I am missing something but....

If you shoot 60P and convert to SD it will look just like 30 frame interlaced SD video. If you shoot 30P and convert to SD it will look more like progressive footage and closer to a 24P film like cadence. If you shoot 30 INTERLACED (i) and transfer to SD it will look like 60P. That is probably why someone is telling you to shoot at 30. But they mean 30 INTERLACED not PROGRESSIVE. 60P is great if you are staying in HD but converting to SD will gain you nothing.

If I am missing something here I would love to know.
Thanks
 
Why do you say that 60P converted to 30i will have an interlaced look? The conversion should drop every other frame to maintain the temporal resolution, and then take the remaining frame and encode it using two fields, but they should still form a single frame as recorded by the camera.
 
60P translated to SD will look interlaced because each discrete frame of 60P gets laid down to a separate field of 30i, cause thats what 30i is. 60 fields. Make sense?
 
Hmmm. That depends on how the conversion from 60P to 30i is done.

I hadn't even considered the approach of forming each 30i field from separate 60P frames. I would have thought that every other 60P frame would be discarded first to create the temporal resolution needed for 30i, and that the fields would be created from the remaining 60P frames. That would preserve a progressive image.
 
There is no such thing as 30i. NTSC/ATSC video runs at 60i (technically 59.94 fields per second)
 
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