24P and consumer cameras?

M

Mark Seibert

Well-known member
I watched the tutorial on 24P and was slightly confused in terms of using a consumer camera. David, you mention that we should always work in 24P. So my question is, what do you suggest for a workflow and format given the following:

1. I use a lot of still images that are very high resolution, along with footage shot at SD 720x480 29.97i, and video captured from a PC capture system at full frames 1024x768 30 fps

2. I almost always have to generate videos for playback on both a SD DVD and for playback on a PC as 800x600 WMV, and/or 1024x768 WMV.

How would you approach this? Anyone else want to make suggestions for workflow on this?
 
Well, what I said was that if you're using 24p material, you want to edit in 24p. It gets a little more complicated if you add in other frame rates.

Photos don't matter -- you can use them in any frame rate. Be careful, though -- their fine detail may/will cause flickers in SD, and the "Reduce Interlace Flicker" checkbox may not resolve the problem. A vertical blur of about .001 or .002 usually solves the problem.

As for the 60i footage, it depends on if you want to keep its video look or not. If you want it to (sort of) match the 24p footage, then edit in a 24p timeline. If you don't have a lot of it, I'd suggest rendering it all out as 24p before you mix it in with the rest of the footage. If you have a very great deal of it and are pressed for time, you can probably just drop it into a 24p timeline and be OK.

But if you want to keep its video look, then edit in 60i. But if you're planning to do anything with the 24p material which involves motion -- transitions, track motion, text, etc. -- do that first in a 24p timeline, then render out as DV with 2-3 pulldown before you go to a 60i timeline.

Why that big for WMV? I'm going to bet that if you render out as normal 640x480 (with 1.000 pixel) at high quality, if they play it full-screen, it will look pretty much the same as if you had rendered to those frame sizes, and you'll have a much smaller file.
 
Hi David, Thanks for your help. Can I ask for a few points of clarification?

Photos causing flicker in SD. Most of my work goes straight to PC, but on occasion we go for the SD TV. I haven’t looked at this much, but suspect that I will see what you describe as soon as I do. Are you saying that I should apply the “Gaussian Blur” as an FX on still images with a vertical blur of about .001 or .002. Or is there a different FX I should use?

Please forgive my ignorance here - When you say 60i, is that the same as what Vegas calls 720x480x32 29.970i? Can you clarify?

The reason for the high res WMV’s, is that I work for a game company and we often display our video on high res LCD’s at 1024x768. We’d go higher res, but we start having problems maintaining 30 FPS on streams greater than 1024x768 – basically it seems like the sweet spot for us across most systems. Lower res – 800x600 and 640x480 usually cause UI elements to become unreadable.
 
I usually use the linear blur for it -- you set the angle to 90 and use .001. Gaussian blur is a little different, but would probably work out the same.

60i is commonly referred to as 29.97i, yes, but it's not limited just to DV resolution -- it's the same in HD, too.

You can render at pretty much any resolution you want; I just suggested the lower resolution to save you some file space. For DVD, you'd be rendering to MPEG-2, anyway, so render it however you want for WMV.

If the text size is an issue, then you'll probably see the problem when you play the SD DVD. With that, you're at 720x480, period.
 
It's interesting that Vegas calls it 60i for HD, but not for 29.970i. Thanks for the clarification.

Yep - you're right, we do hi res for WMV's to keep the UI looking good, but when we go to SD DVD we just get what we get. Thanks again for the help :)
 
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