30P for dance recitals

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firehawk

Veteran
I've been shooting 720 60P, but this year I'm thinking of shooting 1080 30P because it will allow my far back camera to need to zoom less (image degrades with light loss and gain) and allow me to crop zoom in post to get cleaner tight shots when needed.
So, I am thinking of shooting all the cameras in 1080 30p even thought I really only need 1080 on the one. Or 720 60P for all but the one camera. I don't really need to slow motion anything.
Has anyone mixed 60P and 30P dance footage and is it noticeable?
 
I have shot both. I prefer 30p entirely.
But it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are producing these for the dancers or other dancers to review or study then you might WANT that more clinical "video-ish" motion quality of 60P.
I think dance videos suffer at 24p, but at 30p there seems to be a very nice balance of look and motion quality.

As for blending the two - you'll see a difference. But not all the time and not in every shot - depending on how you have shot it.
But if you only use 2 static mounted cameras and cut between them you probably will notice the difference - but this effect will be minimized if the 30p shot is always the long shot and the 60p is always the tighter shot. (or vice versa.)

You'll have to try it once and see how much difference in feel the two frame rates give you and if it's OK with you in your final result. You may be pleasantly surprised with 30p.
 
Anything which has a good amount of motion in it will show a very noticeable difference between 60p and 30p. 60p will look more "live."
 
Thank you both. I'm thinking about just doing 30P for all the cameras (though I was originally thinking of keeping the close up camera at 60P).
As long as 30P looks okay. The only possible disadvantage would be loss of good slow motion and frame grabs for stills I suppose. I realize the motion blur will be different but as long as the footage looks ok then everyone should be happy.
I'm going to try to test a bit on rehearsal if I can.
 
Personally, I hate the look of faster shutter speeds for dance, especially for ballet and contemporary. I shoot them all in 25p. Sure, stills aren't as sharp from a frame, but moving pictures look more fluid. Higher speeds are ok for some styles where movement is fast, so it's about the balance of the two for me. Body popping and funky lighting will lead me to 50, while flowing and delicate points to 25.
 
My .02. 30P has always looked strange to me. The cadence is "off" to my eye. I know a lot have things that have been shot 30P, both on purpose and "by accident" because people didn't understand that 30P isn't the same as 30i was when we shot SD. Personally I've always felt if you wanna shoot "film look", shoot 24P(23.98), "video", 60(59.94). Anything else is for over and under cranking. ​
 
firehawk said:
I've been shooting 720 60P
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I recently shot a gig with those settings, 720p 59.94fps. It's nice, when the framerate is kept (and so far, only BluRay supports the 60p), otherwise, you'll have to convert to either 60i (which is 29.976fps interlaced, using each frame as a "field" in the interlaced encoded video) or 30p (which will eventually skip one frame every frame when encoding).
All in all, I encoded the final version down in 30p and it looks great. It's less "videoish" than the 60p of course, but the result is clean. That being said, the final delivery format was only DVD. I guess when I'll put it on the web (vimeo, youtube) the 60p version will show a major difference in terms of motion.

If I had to redo the same show again, I'd go with 30p and 1080 resolution straight from the start. The smaller resolution and "higher-than-necessary" framerate makes the workflow harder, and to me, not worth it.
1080/30p down to DVD in 30p would be easier, and won't show a major difference. Otherwise, shoot 1080/60i and encode to DVD interlaced, you'll keep the "smooth" look.
 
Run&Gun said:
I know a lot have things that have been shot 30P, both on purpose and "by accident" because people didn't understand that 30P isn't the same as 30i was when we shot SD.
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It's no different in HD; there actually is no "30i", only 60i. This exact confusion is one of the biggest reasons I created the 24p & Frame Rates tutorial.
 
Yeah good point about Blu-Ray. I decided not to offer Blu-Ray this year on the recitals and only do DVDs. The 720 60P footage did make nice Blu-Rays in years past but I assume that 1080 30P footage exported to 1080 60i for Blu-Ray would be nice too.
Yeah the whole 29.97 / 30 fps and 60i (60 fields) /29.97 (30 frames) thing still causes so much confusion! And what I really don't like is that 60i in HD is now upper fields first instead of lower fields like it used to be in SD! I come across so much footage done wrong but people can get away with it if it's going on the internet. I've had to deal with video exported in PAL for NTSC DVDs and all sorts of field problems because they just picked a setting to export having no idea what any of it meant :) So much to learn in this profession
 
That's a very good point. People are frequently told on the net that the old PAL and NTSC differences are gone! Just don't exist any more, and take a perfectly good project and send a DVD across the world, or send a file electronically. If somebody then says they need a frame rate conversion , they just pick the nearest one and assume it will look the same. I'm even sure some people spot the problems and just assume it's because they're in the wrong country with wrong country display kit, so it will be fine five thousand miles away!
 
firehawk said:
The 720 60P footage did make nice Blu-Rays in years past but I assume that 1080 30P footage exported to 1080 60i for Blu-Ray would be nice too.
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If the footage is shot in progressive mode, even if you export as interlaced, it won't look any different. It's more or less about compliancy at that point.
Because the look is determined at the recording: 30p looks different than 60i because the first records complete images (29.97fps) while the other still records 29.976fps, but with an upper field and a lower field, one after the other. That's why it looks smoother. It's not like 60p which is 60 images recorded progressively, but it's an "in-between" compromise.
If you shoot it 30p, export 30p, especially for BluRay. Otherwise, shoot, edit and export 60i. Less hassle in conversion.

firehawk said:
I've had to deal with video exported in PAL for NTSC DVDs and all sorts of field problems because they just picked a setting to export having no idea what any of it meant :) So much to learn in this profession
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There's always a simple trick that can do the job on most players. Read it here.
 
David Jimerson said:
It's no different in HD; there actually is no "30i", only 60i. This exact confusion is one of the biggest reasons I created the 24p & Frame Rates tutorial.
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I think we're kind of arguing semantics… Back in the SD days, the video system was interlaced and we shot 30 FRAMES which were made up of two fields(odd & even) per frame which gave us 60 FIELDS/sec. Jump to HD and 1080/60i or 720/60P is the same look as when we shot 30 frames in SD(interlaced).

I stand by my original comment/opinion that 30P in HD does not look the same as 30 frames in SD(interlaced) or 1080/60i or 720/60P.
 
Run&Gun said:
I think we're kind of arguing semantics… Back in the SD days, the video system was interlaced and we shot 30 FRAMES which were made up of two fields(odd & even) per frame which gave us 60 FIELDS/sec. Jump to HD and 1080/60i or 720/60P is the same look as when we shot 30 frames in SD(interlaced).

I stand by my original comment/opinion that 30P in HD does not look the same as 30 frames in SD(interlaced) or 1080/60i or 720/60P.
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I'm pretty sure you misunderstood me.

Yes, "30i" -- 30 "frames" which are not actually frames, but two interlaced fields taken at two different moments in time, each being a separate motion -- is actually 60i, 60 distinct fields each taken at a different time and each being a distinct motion, but without the added fiction that pairs of them represent "frames."

So, of course 30p doesn't look the same as "30i," in any resolution, because it's not in any way the same. That's where a ton of confusion lies, and that, as I said, is one of the main reasons I created the 24p & Frame Rates tutorial.

What I said is that it's all the same problem in HD, not just SD. Motion in 30p in SD and motion 30p in HD look the same. Motion in 60i in SD and motion in 60i in HD look the same. Same for 24p and 60p between SD and HD. And the motion of 60i is the same as the motion of 60p at any resolution.

But there's the silly, fictional "30i" designation in both SD and HD, too.

The notation of "30i" should be done away with whether it's HD or SD, but it plagues both. The problem didn't go away with the passing of SD.
 
David Jimerson said:
I'm pretty sure you misunderstood me.

Yes, "30i" -- 30 "frames" which are not actually frames, but two interlaced fields taken at two different moments in time, each being a separate motion -- is actually 60i, 60 distinct fields each taken at a different time and each being a distinct motion, but without the added fiction that pairs of them represent "frames."

So, of course 30p doesn't look the same as "30i," in any resolution, because it's not in any way the same. That's where a ton of confusion lies, and that, as I said, is one of the main reasons I created the 24p & Frame Rates tutorial.

What I said is that it's all the same problem in HD, not just SD. Motion in 30p in SD and motion 30p in HD look the same. Motion in 60i in SD and motion in 60i in HD look the same. Same for 24p and 60p between SD and HD. And the motion of 60i is the same as the motion of 60p at any resolution.

But there's the silly, fictional "30i" designation in both SD and HD, too.

The notation of "30i" should be done away with whether it's HD or SD, but it plagues both. The problem didn't go away with the passing of SD.
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Yes. And I didn't misunderstand you, but I think you did a better job explaining it than I did. We never referred to it as 30i back in the day, and I don't really know of anyone referring to it as that today, I simply referred to it like that for clarification of the former interlaced(60 field) system in the SD days(I'd say with the exception of the DVX-100, I never shot anything "progressive" until I crossed over into HD around '03. For the all intents and purposes, progressive really didn't exist in SD).

You're right, there is a lot of confusion still, but not on my part. Maybe I should have broken it down and gotten slightly more technical, but I was trying to help those that still may be confused thinking that shooting 30P in HD will give them the same motion/look as 30 frames/60 fields in SD(which was interlaced).
 
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That's good to explain all that because some think that shooting 60i and then de-interlacing it will result in 30P not realizing that the actual look of motion will not be the same as if it was shot in 30P in the first place.
 
firehawk said:
That's good to explain all that because some think that shooting 60i and then de-interlacing it will result in 30P not realizing that the actual look of motion will not be the same as if it was shot in 30P in the first place.
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Actually, if you don't resample, and create a new 30p frame out of every other 60i field cleanly, you won't have the resolution of native 30p, but you'll have the same motion. But if you blend fields, you won't.
 
Run&Gun said:
For the all intents and purposes, progressive really didn't exist in SD).
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Sure it did. It was imaged as progressive natively; just couldn't be recorded to tape natively as progressive; it required pulldown and recording in a 60i (or 50i in PAL) stream. But once you removed the pulldown (and that's for both 24p and 30p), you had your clean, native-progressive frames back.

This, too, was the case for HD in many cases, especially early on, and in some cases still is. Not every HD camera records everything as its straight frame rate and as progressive; there's still some 60i out there.
 
David Jimerson said:
Actually, if you don't resample, and create a new 30p frame out of every other 60i field cleanly, you won't have the resolution of native 30p, but you'll have the same motion. But if you blend fields, you won't.
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ahhhh.... Good point. I hadn't realized that. Thank you
 
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