Best Settings for PAL Broadcast? 1080 or 720?

[powervideo]

Please don't tell me to search the forum. I've done so for days and haven't found what I'm looking for. Nearly all the advice re the hack is for "NTSC" users with 24P, 30P or 60i.

I'm shooting a music video on Varicam and GH1 next week, and haven't got time to do extensive comparos between all the formats. The music video can be mastererd either in 720 or 1080 as it's primary broadcast standard will PAL SD. If anyone could run me down the prefferred settings to get a high-quality 25P progressive look I'd really appreciate. I have done some very nice tests with 1080 AVCHD but CS5 reports the clips as 29.97 so I've got something wrong somewhere.

So to cut to the chase;

1. AVCHD or MJPEG?
2. 1080 or 720
3. 25P Native selected?
4. 720 50P to 720 25P?
5. C-setting

 

[tsupka]

stable good settings for PAL broadcast for now is AVCHD C settings with 25p native checked on
use 25p 1080 for more cinematic look and 50p 720 for slomo shots
FCP interpret 1080/25p/n as interlaced so check it,
get a fast card

 

[emory]

stable good settings for PAL broadcast for now is AVCHD C settings with 25p native checked on

These settings are stable with one caveat:

with camera on a tripod and no subject motion, I get a write error message after several seconds -- even with a "fast" card (Sandisk Extreme 30MB/s). As long as the camera or the subject is moving, everything is fine.

 

[Martti Ekstrand]

CS5 reports the clips as 29.97 so I've got something wrong somewhere.

No, you don't. Some engineer at Panasonic forgot to change that metatag for PAL version - been like that since GH1 was released last year. I have had no problems with it when I transcode, maybe CS5 hiccups if handling native .mts files.

As for what to chose I'd say 1080 unless you want a slo-mo take. Here's a commercial I did last year with a, naturally, unhacked GH1 - all shot and posted in 1080p glory and then scaled down in last step for 576p broadcast. Client very happy both with that and a 1080p QuickTime file for projection use at various corporate pow-wows.

http://vimeo.com/6997918

 

[powervideo]

I only got got write errors on one shot - a wide shot in a forest with lots of detail on the 20mm pancake. It was all just too damn sharp. All the other shots taken on the Contax primes were fine.