Film Look and HDV

M

Maximum Ice

New member
Hello:

I'm new to this forum and could use some help with some due-process questions as well as some workflow questions for Vegas.

Let me start off by saying that I understand that achieving a film look in video is subjective. Using a myriad of video effects and colour corrections and such, one can creatively make a video that looks like film.

However, for the purposes of these questions, I am strictly concerned with emulating the cadence of film.

I shoot on a Canon XH-A1 and it only shoots in 60i, 50i, 24F, 25F and 30F. I'd like my final product to be burned to a regular DVD that can be played on a video projector in a theater or played on a widescreen HDTV (LCD or Plasma)

I did view David's video on 24P but I still have some lingering questions. After searching through many posts, I have learned there are two ways I can emulate the cadence of film with video.

1.) Shoot in 50i, with a shutter speed of 1/50, deinterlace to 25P and then slow down the footage 4% to get a 24P cadence. My Question is:
a.) To do this, what do my Project Settings have to be?
b.) How do I deinterlace to 25P?
c.) If I deinterlace to 25P (PAL) but slow my footage down to 24P (NTSC)
What do my "Render As" Settings have to be? 24P NTSC or 25P PAL
c.) What is the step by step workflow with HDV to follow this method?

2.) Shoot in 60i, with a shutter speed of 1/60, deinterlace to 30P,
downconvert the 30P footage to 24P with some kind of pulldown or
pulldown removal (I'm confused which is which) and then output to DVD
a.) Again, what do my Project settings have to be? How do I deinterlace
to 30P?
b.) What is the step by step workflow with HDV to follow this method?
c.) What are my Render settings supposed to be?

3.) Can anyone describe for me how I can best reproduce the cadence of film with footage shot in 60i or 50i with the least loss of video quality, without messing with the aspect ratio and the order of my clips?

I've read Douglas Spotted Eagle's "How to get a Film Look" but I found his step by step instructions too vague. When I tried following his guide, I found that my clips rearranged themselves in a different order and any adjustments I made to frame sizes with Pan/Crop got all messed up and my Aspect Ratio was off.

If anyone can help me with this problem, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm losing hair trying to find these answers!

Thanks!

-Maximum Ice:crybaby:
 
Depending on were your final product is going to be broadcasted.

I would say 24F and 25F is the two modes that I would use.

That gives the best filmlook.
 
I know that shooting 24F and 25F mimic the cadence quite well. But from another forum I was reading, it seems as though there is a trade off in filming 24F and 25F and that is loss of resolution. As explained by Nate Weaver in another forum

"The Canon is a problem of semantics. Canon doesn't want to call it 24P, because technically, that is reserved for CCDs that are progressively scanned (and purpose built for that, which is technically more difficult and more expensive). So, they take a 1440x1080 interlaced chip, and do signal processing voodoo between the field scans off the chip, and end up with 24 discrete, full, frames per second.

Of course there's no free lunches, so the downside of this is that because they're doing weird things with fields, vertical resolution takes a little bit of hit. In the end, the signal processing outputs 24 full frames per second which is then passed along to the MPEG encoder, yadda yadda yadda."

So, even though 24F outputs 24 discrete frames per second, vertical resolution takes a hit.

I was wondering what would be the most "image-preserving" way of getting a 24P NTSC DVD? Shooting in 60i and converting in the NLE OR shooting in 24F OR Shooting in PAL and slowing down the footage. Any idea which method preserves the image quality the best and yet still keeps the cadence as close to film as possible?
 
The 24F and 25F mode is very good, and you will get worse results if you shoot 50i or 60i and then convert in post.

Because the in camera processing occurs before compression. To encode 50i first and then deinterlace will seriously impact quality.

I read something like the quality drop from F mode is just 10% of Interlace.

And deinterlacing is sometimes as bad as 50% quality drop.



For a 24P DVD, 24F is the best mode.
 
Thank You MovieSwede. Just the kind of answer I was looking for. Do you have any other sources you can suggest that discuss this very thing?

Supposing I shoot in 24F then, what should my Project Settings be for editing, and then once my editing is done and I want to output it onto DVD, what should my Render settings be?
 
If you shoot 24F your project settings would be 23,976P

and for DVD you encode it as 23,976P + Pulldown.
 
For DVD, use the DVD Architect 24p Widescreen DVD template. It doesn't add pulldown, but it does add pulldown instructions for the DVD player so the player will add it.

Do NOT change any settings in the template except for this one: once you click "Custom," on the Project tab, change the quality setting from Good to Best, because you will be resizing the footage. But do not change anything else.
 
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