24p vs 30p vs 60p vs 60i

Yak said:
Let us not forget that frame rate is only a part (and some say a small part) of "the film look" , other things like DOF, dynamic range, lighting, color grading, grain among other things also help create the "film look"

One of the most important difference between 60i and 24P (& 30P) is capturing in a interlaced or progressive frame. A large part of the "video Look" comes from shooting interlaced
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I disagree strongly with this, because of what my eyes tell me. I'm not simply biased toward 24 fps. Like Barry, 24 fps is the deal-breaker for me in terms of the film look. Sure, other things are important. But the most well-shot 30p footage in the world (such as from a fancy 5D Mark II production) will still look distractingly non-film-like to me. I would honestly feel more comfortable with poorly-shot 24p from a cheap camcorder.

To borrow a term from CGI animation and visual effects, there's an "Uncanny Valley" with 30p...
 
Is weird to see how long this things are experience by us in cinema and tv and still we do not know for sure what make it different from each other.

Anyway I just bought a GH1 and it does not do 1080/60p so I prefer 24p because is what I can get.
 
Let me ask somenthing.
If I'm using different kids of cameras should I remove the pull down from Gh1 before importing to timeline or after exported the whole project??

In my case I have at least 3 cameras that shoots 1440x1080/60i and will need to mix the footage. SInce gh1 is the best in low light.
 
To the question "Are you saying that 60p looks "cinematic"?

I found this clip shot 720p most over cranked to 60fps with some 30p footage

http://vimeo.com/4335192

is it "cinematic" I will let you decide, to my eye it looks great and I would be proud to have my footage look that good
 
Cranky wrote "Does not matter what the original frame rate was, it plays at 30p"

I thought the point was how we record our footage not how it is played back, most 24P is play back at 30 fps on a video stream, I am not aware of many devices that play back at 60fps even in a movie theater 24fps is played back at 24fps or 48fps not 60fps
 
My TV plays back at 60fps...

I am going with cranky - its what its played back as... this is what the eye is seeing, and a 24fps has a slower frame rate making it look ''cinematic''.
 
Yak said:
Cranky wrote "Does not matter what the original frame rate was, it plays at 30p"

I thought the point was how we record our footage not how it is played back, most 24P is play back at 30 fps on a video stream, I am not aware of many devices that play back at 60fps even in a movie theater 24fps is played back at 24fps or 48fps not 60fps
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Video is 30 frames/s, interlaced, meaning 60 unique images/s in case of native interlaced video. This is 60 fps for any practical purposes. 60p works the same sans interlaced artifacts. Film-in-video usually plays at 60 images/s (better TVs can do 48ips or 72ips or 120ips), but there are only 24 unique images in every 60 because of pulldown. Hence, the rate of unique images is 24 per second regardless of final refresh rate. These 24 frames flash two or three times each, which is similar to how they are projected in a movie theater, only a movie theater has no 2-3 irregularity. Hence, 24p-in-60i or 24p-in-60p or even 24p-in-120p still looks like 24fps movie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine

The video you linked to has 30 unique images per second, played at 30 fps.

To put in in some sort of formula: look = f(min(unique image rate, refresh rate))

The above formula and discussion are correct if no funky things like MotionFlow is involved.
 
Yak said:
most 24P is play back at 30 fps on a video stream
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No, in NTSC countries 24p movies is played in a 60i video stream. This has been giving it a somewhat stuttery cadence which many consider a big part of 'film look' when viewing on television monitors.

For us in PAL countries who has mainly seen 24 fps movies played back in 50i stream somewhat speeded up but smooth we don't feel that much difference in frame / field rate between material from film or video cameras. Here, image 'feel' (ie colour range, latitude, grain/noise pattern, electronic sharpening artefacts or lack of such) and DOF has been more defining factors in perceiving a 'film look' on moving images here.

For me what makes 5DmkII / 7D feel videoish is Canon's tendency to a somewhat coarse default edge sharpening and the green-purple moire around horizontal lines, not the 30 fps. It's to a great extent a matter of individual experience and perception.
 
What do you mean by "Us" and "We" ?
Definitely not Me and You ,because I live in pal country and i see the difference between interlaced source from videocam and progressive film source displayed on interlaced TV.
What matters is the source and frame rate used during capturing, its doesnt matter how you will display it because motion blur would be still the same unless you will do some heavy and odd frame blending and i dont see that in movies on DVD that have 25 frames per second.
I displaying progressive movies on my interlaced tv and it still looks like film and very different from my old sony interlaced camcorder .
You are just wrong.

I can display my video camcorder footage 50 fields per second and then record this on film camera in 24progressive and it would never look like film because it just doesnt matter later,recording it 50 interlaced and then again in 24p wont change the look of motion blur ,it can only make it worse by blending frames and blended ugly frames is not look of the film.
 
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I didn't say I or any other don't see the difference between 50 fields / 25 frames but in my nearly 30+ years experience working in this business I've noticed that taking a 50i source and turning it in to 25 fps but either just dropping every second field or something more advanced has not made it look that much more like film if other parts of the image still looks 'electronic' from those factors I mentioned. And it's not just based on my own opinion but comments from hundreds of co-workers and clients over the years. Try it yourself, convert something from that sony camcorder to 25 fps and I doubt you'll think it looks like film.
 
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bwwd said:
I can display my video camcorder footage 50 fields per second and then record this on film camera in 24progressive and it would never look like film because it just doesnt matter later,recording it 50 interlaced and then again in 24p wont change the look of motion blur ,it can only make it worse by blending frames and blended ugly frames is not look of the film.
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Converting interlaced into progressive had been used in olden times to obtain filmic look, and it does work, though you lose resolution.

BBC has been shooting 25i and converting into 25p in post and then broadcasting as 25i for quite some time now. They lose resolution, but the end result does look "filmic". Watch any pre-HD Top Gear show. Live studio stuff is native 25i, but recorded segments are all 25i->25p stuff. Modern HD version looks the same, only they use true 25p for recorded segments, and 50i for the studio.
 
Martti Ekstrand said:
I didn't say I or any other don't see the difference between 50 fields / 25 frames but in my nearly 30+ experience working in this business I've noticed that taking a 50i source and turning it in to 25 fps but either just dropping every second field or something more advanced has not made it look that much more like film if other parts of the image still looks 'electronic' from those factors I mentioned. And it's not just based on my own opinion but comments from hundreds of co-workers and clients over the years. Try it yourself, convert something from that sony camcorder to 25 fps and I doubt you'll think it looks like film.
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People do it all the time when they upload to YouTube or Vimeo, and it does look like film, usually a rather crappy film, still it lacks the "reality" look of high-image-rate video. It is obvious and can be explained technically. If you don't see it, it does not mean there is no difference.
 
Cranky said:
If you don't see it, it does not mean there is no difference.
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Please try to read properly, again: I never said that I or anybody else don't see it - I just said it's not the sole determining factor in 'cinema look'. If it were we wouldn't be here talking about using still photography cameras for moving images.

But OK - let me go through my experience with this. I've been attempting a 'cinema look' from video cameras for a long time, far too long that I like to think of actually. Make me ponder on eulogies, epitaphs and daisies which I rather not.

At first I did try to make video more cinematic with material shot on BetaCam cameras by simply dropping every second field in a DVE using things like 'time posterizing' or by mucking with a time base corrector. All the other video image characteristics where there; coarse edge sharpening, bad latitude, blown highlights etc, light trails etc. People including myself thought it still looked like video. Especially the clients. Tweaked and turned on everything available in the online systems at the time, could get at something looking nice but still 'video'. To soften the harshness of video at the time I went as far as reshooting spots on a monitor in the online that was covered with a paper and then mixed that with the original. Cool look but still 'video'. At 25p.

Some years later Sony's first DigiBeta cameras came along and Quantel systems started to be available at somewhat reasonable cost. Those cameras had better latitude, great deal better highlights handling and look hey! Wassat? A menu where one could go in and set something called 'Detail' to -20! Great scott! Much less edge sharpening. And then in Quantel do a much better de-interlacing where a lot less resolution was lost. People including myself though it still looked like video. Tweaked and turned on everything in the Quantel system and could get something with much more film like colour rendition. Added grain (scanned from filming a grey board) and well I almost convinced myself that now it looked like film but clients still didn't think so. Started to experiment with taking the close-ups in a spot and roto-matte the background (helps having started in classic animation) and then blur it. Clients went "Wowsa! What did you do? Now it looks like film!"

Sometimes clients saw the material treated like above but the de-interlacing was not done to it yet - they very very seldom noticed the difference between 50i and 25 fps but thought it looked like film anyhow. I always took the time to do the de-interlacing anyway for my own personal benefit. To the chagrins of the producers who didn't really see the difference either and and wanted me out of the costly EditBox suite two hours ago. Got some pride in my work even if it's just a commercial.

I also experimented with setting my VX1000 to a 1/50 shutter and thereby effectively forcing a de-interlace in camera. Still looked like video but again if I push down the Detail setting to minimum and grade properly it somewhat resembles film, especially if shooting at the long end of the zoom so background is blurred.

All the time through all this above I still shot mostly on film, video was when clients didn't have the budget for film. And this is where I eventually ran into two american Flame / Inferno artists who had moved to work here in Stockholm. Who both were sitting and complaining that the film footage shot here at 25 fps didn't look like film! I and others at the post facilities pointed out that it was indeed shot on film so they must be crazy. After a couple of months both realised at their own that what they were missing was the somewhat uneven feel from the pulldown cadence. After a year or so both actually had come to dislike that unevenness and much prefer the smoother looking 25 fps. (And they never missed trying to chroma-key 24p in 60i materal.)

So this is what I base my humble observation on - frame rate is one factor in 'cinema look' and of course the greater difference between 60i and 24 fps rather than 50i / 25p will make a more pronounced factor but it's not the only one. And again it's also very much a matter of personal perception plus taste. As examples James Cameron has mentioned that he would like to see movies move to 48 fps at several occasions and Douglas Trumbull - RIP - designed a new cinema system "Showscan" and he wanted that the frame rate standard would be 60 fps. Also I've know people who has grown up on playing Counterstrike at ungodly frame rates and think 24 fps suck, "it's just blurry as soon as anything moves!". So to claim that I'm "wrong" is really discounting the myriads of individual ways human perception works.

Myself? Yeah, I do prefer 24 / 25 fps over 50 or 60, I like that it's a tad 'unreal'. And this I know with certainty after having those frame rates available to me for 9 months now with my GH1 played back on my computer monitor capable of a 120Hz refresh rate.
 
Martti, there was no need to go into such deep explanation. I see what you are saying. Sharp video look, no soft headroom/footroom, limited latitude, etc, etc. But this has no relation to MOTION whatsoever. I was replying to this particular phrase:

I've noticed that taking a 50i source and turning it in to 25 fps but either just dropping every second field or something more advanced has not made it look that much more like film if other parts of the image still looks 'electronic' from those factors I mentioned.
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In my opinion, dropping every other field DOES make video look like film. Not a still frame of such a video, but the video as a whole has different motion characteristics. It does look different to me. I can clearly see the difference in motion. I don't care for colors or latitude, it does look closer to real movie simply because of lower frame rate.

It is another question whether low frame rate is good, whether "film look" is a good thing. Objectively, it sucks. I watched "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" 6 months ago, and it was horrible experience. Lots of vertical lines, panning in confined space, circus-like colors, high contrast -- it was a strobe-fest. I watched Ken Burns's National Parks a month ago, same lousy experience when you see an awe-inspiring landscape, but it strobes every time the camera pans. Horrible, horrible, really. It would look much better in 60p. I believe that 60p converted into 50p for PAL distribution would still look better than 24p speeded up to 25p. Feature movies is another thing. When I see a feature movie with fake interpolated frames on a 120Hz TV, it looks like a cheap soap opera with lame lines and pointless plot. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe the "real" look will allow to separate true masterpieces that do not depend on frame rate from 3-rd rate productions that are only watchable because of "suspension of disbelief" attributed to 24p.
 
Yak said:
I thought the point was how we record our footage not how it is played back
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The point is how the motion is sampled and presented. 24p samples motion 24 times per second. Now, while historically 24p has been transmitted within a 60i data stream, that really doesn't matter all that much because perceptually what the audience sees is 24 images per second. 24p doesn't all of a sudden become "video-ish" just because it's transmitted over a 60i data stream.

If you shoot 60i and transmit 60i, it will be "video-ish". If you shoot 60p and transmit 60p, it will be "video-ish". It is the number of motion samples per second that makes the difference and makes something look "live/video" versus "film".

That's one reason why I hate, despise, and otherwise dislike when people refer to "30i" or NTSC TV as "30fps" -- it isn't. You are seeing sixty motion samples per second, not 30. "30i" makes practically no sense. It's more indicative to think of it as 540/60p than it is to think of it as 1080/30i.


most 24P is play back at 30 fps on a video stream
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No 24p is ever played back at 30fps. It can be embedded in a 60-field-per-second video stream or a 60-frame-per-second video stream. But regardless of how it is embedded, what the user SEES is 24 samples of motion per second.

The 2:3 pulldown makes that an uneven sequence; some frames last a little longer than others, but there are still 24 representations of motion presented to the viewer each second.

I am not aware of many devices that play back at 60fps
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Every television set in any NTSC-based country plays back 60fps. Either 720/60p, or 540/60p (aka 1080/60i) or 240/60p (aka 480/60i). They all deliver sixty motion samples per second.

even in a movie theater 24fps is played back at 24fps or 48fps not 60fps
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In a regular movie theater film is always played at 24fps and only 24fps. There is no 48fps going on. Sometimes people think the two-bladed shutter (which flashes the image twice on the screen) means that you're really seeing 48fps, but that's entirely inaccurate. You're seeing 24 motion samples each second. The film runs through the projector at 24 frames per second.
 
50i converted to 25p can look filmic but you have to try very hard to make it work and look filmic , its not like you take random 50i and convert it then you have it wow its film.
I have progressive 25p cam and some shots look filmic but most dont.
Depth of field have more to do with it , i had 35mm adapter and interlaced cam and when i dropped some frames then it looked more filmic than 25progressive cam without 35mm DOF.

I converted footage with 35mm adapter from my sony ,with card , only even fields ,then i had 25fps ,progressive,then i removed some frames, converted it to 22.97 because then it looked filmic sometimes ,but after awhile too much motion blur hitted again and it was visible that its cheap camcorder.Its not that simple but its mostly about motion blur.

Its just that interlaced looks cheap, always will be ,and 24p is associated with film,its not so smooth thats why, too much smoothness looks cheesy and cheap.BEcause you see it from 80s to this day and you know that interlaced footage smoothness resembles motion from your holiday video that you shoot last weekend or 10 years ago or more with 0 budget.
 
I have been discussing 24p vs 30p played back on NTSC broadcast systems, I should have made this clear, I agree fully that on PAL systems 25P is with out a doubt the best way to shoot . I am sorry if I caused any confusion.

As for Barry's response
"Every television set in any NTSC-based country plays back 60fps. Either 720/60p, or 540/60p (aka 1080/60i) or 240/60p (aka 480/60i). They all deliver sixty motion samples per second"
I will Quote Larry Warner site on "the film look" from his HD primer

http://lwp.com/LWP/Film_Look.html

(NTSC) "Broadcasting is an interlaced medium in both SD and HD. It is essentially 30 frames per second. Each frame is drawn twice in 1/30th of a second. Half the lines are drawn in one pass at 1/60 of a second, the other half of the picture is drawn at 1/60 of a second."

My whole point has been that in my experience recording Progressive as opposed to Interlaced creates a more pleasing moving image and if one is creating a production for NTSC Broadcast then there are many advantages to recording in 30P (29.97) over 24P. If one is creating a production for transfer to Film then 24p is clearly the way to go.

I (as well as others) have also been trying to point out that "The Film Look" is much more than just frame rate.
 
"Broadcasting is an interlaced medium in both SD and HD. It is essentially 30 frames per second. Each frame is drawn twice in 1/30th of a second. Half the lines are drawn in one pass at 1/60 of a second, the other half of the picture is drawn at 1/60 of a second." -- it is 30 interlaced frames per second. So, essentially, it is 60 frames per second. Also, he forgot 720p -- no cred.

From your link: "This is because the camera recording the image is essentially doing the same thing, drawing the frame twice every second." -- twice every second? What, 2fps? Oh, no, the same frame twice, so effectively 1fps?

"IF SOMEONE TELLS YOU 24p FOR BROADCAST IS SUPERIOR, THEY WANT TO BENEFIT IN PART OF THE INCREASED COSTS." -- No, they simply warn you that 2-3 IVTC is common in consumer TVs/players, while 2-2 IVTC is still not (which sucks). Which means that with 30p you may lose half of vertical resolution.
 
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