Fight Sequence

[mcshyd]

I'm going to be shooting two fight sequences with the hvr-z1u pretty soon and am thoroughly confused over capture settings, deinterlacing options etc. I own dvfilm and vegas 6, but am still experimenting with what sort of pipeline looks and works the best. My questions are:

1. I would love for the final output to be 24p, but am worried that the fast action will look horrible. Should I shoot at 50i with the internal 25p and then slow it down in post or shoot 60i and use dvfilm to create 24p avi's or quicktimes and then edit the full 24p quicktimes in vegas?

2. The final output is not film, should i just stay in 60i and call it a day?

3. What is the difference between the .m2t files and an intermediary codec? does one handle color correction better than the other?

The pipeline options are overwhelming...
anyway, thanks in advance, I truly appreciate any and all input.

 

[pastywhiteboy]

(1) The best quality method is going to be shooting in CF25 and slowing it down to 24. You could also do the 60i to 24P method, but most of those conversion methods don't do a very good job with deinterlacing. Magic Bullet does a great job, but takes a long, long time to render. Whichever method you decide to go with, just don't change it in the middle of your project and you'll save yourself some headaches.
(2) If the final output is not going to be film, you could also just use the CF30 mode (depending on if you like the way that looks or not) and that would at least keep you away from weird interlacing problems during your fight scenes.
(3) There are a lot of differences between .m2t and an intermediary codec (ie: cineform). First, the cineform codec produces a larger file, but allows you to do frame-accurate editing in real-time or close to real-time. As for .m2t, it's an mpeg stream and is difficult to work with in most editing software. Also, cineform is "visually lossless" whereas mpeg visibly degrades every time you convert or render it.

Well, hopefully I've been accurate and fairly helpful. Good luck with the project!

Pasty

 

[Spiff]

My replies will nearly echo pastywhiteboy's - but hey... at least you'll know what two people think!

1. I would love for the final output to be 24p, but am worried that the fast action will look horrible.

Like the poster above, I suggest shooting CF25. The reason for this is not because the 50i won't work out fine, but rather that for fast motion scenes 50i puts a lot of strain on the compression algorithms in the camera. Choosing CF25 gives you half as much data to store, and the footage will show significantly less compression artifacts and colour banding. (This is based upon CF30 and 60i keying tests I did on my FX1).

Adaptive deinterlacing of 50i will give you more resolution, but not necessarily a better picture overall. Shooting CF25 will give your footage a consistent result and the quality during fast motion will be comparable to the quality during the slower bits.

2. The final output is not film, should i just stay in 60i and call it a day?

Nah. If you are in NTSC land, you may decide shooting CF30 is the better option for DVD encoding, simply because you won't have to slow the footage down at all and won't have to deal with pull-downs. I expect I will choose CF30 for my future narrative projects. 60i will give more compression artifacts and it will prevent the final scene from looking remotely film-like. Considering you're debating a film-like approach, I'd just stay away from this acquisition setting.

3. What is the difference between the .m2t files and an intermediary codec? does one handle color correction better than the other?

Simply put: a good intermediate will handle colour compression just as well if not better than the MPEG-2. Working with the raw transport streams will be consistently a pain-in-the-ass... and recompressing to MPEG-2 TS after colour correction is a poor idea until you're at your final render. All intermediate renders should either go to a suitable intermediate codec, or to uncompressed files.

Good luck!
-Spiff

 

[mcshyd]

Like the poster above, I suggest shooting CF25. The reason for this is not because the 50i won't work out fine, but rather that for fast motion scenes 50i puts a lot of strain on the compression algorithms in the camera. Choosing CF25 gives you half as much data to store, and the footage will show significantly less compression artifacts and colour banding. (This is based upon CF30 and 60i keying tests I did on my FX1).

Thanks, both of you. awesome advice...

I assume that when you shoot in c25, you are ultimately slowing it down to 24p? how are you doing this? How do you handle the 3 or 4 percent audio difference? what is your output format? I had a feeling c25 was going to be the best choice.

as for the intermediary codec, can you just use cineforms outputted avi's and throw away the m2t's? I guess the phrase intermediary confused me.

thanks again. I'm going to have to deinterlace what i have of the project so far, and shoot the rest in c25.

 

[Spiff]

I assume that when you shoot in c25, you are ultimately slowing it down to 24p? how are you doing this? How do you handle the 3 or 4 percent audio difference? what is your output format?

Here's what I would probably do: I would shoot CF25 and edit at 25P. I would create a web-release as a 25P file (probably compressed with WMVHD and H.264) and I would also use the 25P timeline for a PAL DVD.

To create an NTSC DVD you have to do a 4% slowdown on the footage to get it to 23.976 fps. This would normally create a pitch shift, so you have to use an audio-scaler that maintains the pitches - all of which can be done in most NLEs. Now that you have a 24p file, you simply export it with a 2:3 pull-down to an NTSC DVD, and voila - a 24p NTSC DVD.

as for the intermediary codec, can you just use cineforms outputted avi's and throw away the m2t's?

That's what I would do.

-Spiff

 

[mcshyd]

i see cineform for vegas handles this for you..."Conversion of Sony CineFrame-25 material to 24p for film (including audio remodulation)"

another 200 dollars bites the dust...