GH13 in Corporate shoot

A

aae991

Active member
I've got a big corporate shoot in a couple of weeks (really more industrial-type in a factory etc...) and have the option to use a GH13 in addition to my regular HD cameras. What settings would be recommended do attain usable 1080p 30 fps? My client will not accept 24p but requires full 1080, so I'm stuck trying to use a GH13 with 30fps. Should I use MJPEG or AVCHD? Is full 1920 x 1080 not a good idea? I'm not worried about 4:2:2 vs. 4:2:0... My client loves footage of the EX-1, so not a problem with color space...

Thanks for any help/suggestions with this... I did not get the GH13 for corporate use, but I thought as long as I've got the ability to use it, why not???
 
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Client will not accept 24p but requires full 1080?

Umm.. 1080 24p IS full 1080.

If you need 30fps.. the only way to go is 1280 720p or mjpeg.

30fps is weird.. most people do not shoot 30fps... it's 60 or 24.

You can shoot avchd in 60p, and it will have a video look, then you can drop it into a 30p timeline and it will have the 30p look which is somewhere between film and video look. I don't like it myself but that's just me.

Or... you can shoot in 1280 720p and set your shutter at 30.

I would get more clarification from your client. Generally, a client wants a 'video live look' like news or sports shows or soap operas (60p), or they want a film look, like movies and sitcoms and dramas (24p).

I really don't know of a client that wants 30p. It is neither and weird. It looks closer to 24p than it does to 60p but still... it's odd.
Maybe you are getting your terminology screwed up... because old ntsc video is 29.97i - but it has the motion cadence of 60p because it has 60 fields - or 60 changes in motion per second. The only time 30p is used is when they are taking some interlaced content and deinterlacing it for play on a progressive screen like your computer monitor and all new modern flatscreen tvs. They take the 29.97 i which is really 60 frames of about 320 x 240 and merge it into 30p at 640 x 480.. see? ... so it looses that 'live' look and becomes the strange youtube look of 30p.
 
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O.K... Poor choice of words... I'm going on very little sleep :zombie_smiley:...

29.97, 1080 60i... Client always refers to it as 30 fps 1080p (no matter how many times I tell them otherwise).
 
I believe they have 1080p MJPEG 30FPS in the super HQ MJPEG thread. It's 1440 1080p pancaked or something. I'm not exactly sure how it works.

May not be the best though because you can only shoot something like 2-3 minutes max per clip because of 4GB (or was it 2GB) limit to MJPEG file sizes.
 
How exactly is 30fps "weird"? I would venture to guess that the overwhelming majority of video viewable online and on broadcast TV is 30fps, aka 29.97, aka what everyone shoots who isn't in the six or seven hundred person micro niche worldwide who chase 24fps in the mistaken belief that once they either get a cam able to shoot it natively or figure out a workflow that turns 30p into 24p without mucking it up, their inane indie slasher movies will suddenly look like Rashomon.

Have you ever watched 60fps footage on a display that presented it natively? It looks terrible, like a soap opera. Who wants that, unless you're working on the soaps? Every few years someone decides what's wrong with movies/video is the framerate, and they do demos showing how great it is when wagon wheels in Westerns don't turn backwards, and everyone except the guy who concocted the demo says ewww, that looks like a soap opera, and goes back to 24p on film and 30p on video.

60p shooting for video is great for the slow motion options it brings to the editing bay. But for actual playback? No.

Blackout said:
Client will not accept 24p but requires full 1080?

Umm.. 1080 24p IS full 1080.

If you need 30fps.. the only way to go is 1280 720p or mjpeg.

30fps is weird.. most people do not shoot 30fps... it's 60 or 24.

You can shoot avchd in 60p, and it will have a video look, then you can drop it into a 30p timeline and it will have the 30p look which is somewhere between film and video look. I don't like it myself but that's just me.

Or... you can shoot in 1280 720p and set your shutter at 30.

I would get more clarification from your client. Generally, a client wants a 'video live look' like news or sports shows or soap operas (60p), or they want a film look, like movies and sitcoms and dramas (24p).

I really don't know of a client that wants 30p. It is neither and weird. It looks closer to 24p than it does to 60p but still... it's odd.
Maybe you are getting your terminology screwed up... because old ntsc video is 29.97i - but it has the motion cadence of 60p because it has 60 fields - or 60 changes in motion per second. The only time 30p is used is when they are taking some interlaced content and deinterlacing it for play on a progressive screen like your computer monitor and all new modern flatscreen tvs. They take the 29.97 i which is really 60 frames of about 320 x 240 and merge it into 30p at 640 x 480.. see? ... so it looses that 'live' look and becomes the strange youtube look of 30p.
Click to expand...
 
The "30fps" name is misleading and confusing. The camcorder manufacturers have taken to abandoning that nomenclature in favor of a much more descriptive "60i" terminology.

Now, back to the question at hand -- the GH1 doesn't shoot 1080/60i. Period. So if that's what your client demands, the GH1 is the wrong product for that job. The closest you can get is, like Blackout suggested, to shoot 720/60p and then convert it to 1080/60i in post for delivery.
 
60 fps is what it is for 'live look'. News..... sports... reporting.... it looks near what life looks like but flat... most peoples eyes don't perceive much more than 60 changes in motion... maybe 70...

I agree it's ugly if you are trying to do a narrative film, but it does have it's uses... it's not horrible looking. So when I say 30fps or 29.97.. I am no talking about interlace TV... that looks like 60p... but just low resolution cause of the old crt interlace... but still, you expect to see certain things in 60 changes of motion per second like the academy awards, live shows, red carpet interviews... news... ect...

If you are going to do narrative... do 23.97 (24p).... why the hell do 30p meaning 30 full progressive frames? I mean I guess you can.. there isn't anything 'horrible' about it, but I don't like it.. the shutter and motion cadence are strange to my eyes.. perhaps it's just a taste thing.

Movies are at 24p and it's not so much that 24p makes your film better, but there definitely is some hypnotic difference that people have been used to seeing for years and enjoy... 24p almost ads some sort of coating on top of everything to make the suspension of disbelief work better.... I remember seeing "the making of JFK" the Oliver Stone film.. and it was all 60i stuff.. video.... it looked so awful the sets and the fake plastic jfk head... then, boom, cut to the 24p... and suddenly the LACK of temporal information glosses something over and makes it work... it's worked for 100 years so something must be right about 24p....

I toyed with 30p for a little while on the XL1 before the DVX100 was available.. as it was the closest I could get to 24p at the time on video without some bizarre plugins that took forever to try and render 60 fields into 24 progressive frames and never looked quite right....

I was never quite happy with the XL1 but it was the best I could do at the time... I would not choose 30p for anything on purpose unless it was just for a very simple thing like I shot in 60p by accident and wanted to simply half it.... 30p doesn't seem smooth enough to be live, and isn't slow enough to look as good as 24p motion blur does... of course that I just my opinion.

I am with you on hating the idea of making 'films' with faster frame rates... I think the HD tvs that do that 'smooth motion' speed up thing to films and interpolate the footage in real time to bring a 24p film up to 60 or 120 fps are absolutely HORRIBLE!!!! the movie looks like it was shot on home video!
 
Barry_Green said:
The "30fps" name is misleading and confusing. The camcorder manufacturers have taken to abandoning that nomenclature in favor of a much more descriptive "60i" terminology.

Now, back to the question at hand -- the GH1 doesn't shoot 1080/60i. Period. So if that's what your client demands, the GH1 is the wrong product for that job. The closest you can get is, like Blackout suggested, to shoot 720/60p and then convert it to 1080/60i in post for delivery.
Click to expand...

O.K. Stupid question... How well does 720/60p convert to 1080 60i quality-wise? I've never done that. Again, this won't be my "A" cam at the shoot, but given the quality it produces I'd like to have it used from a different perspective - and the "I love gadgets" part of me wants to have some fun! I've got enough quality crew with me to run the "A" and "B" cams for most shots allowing me time to "play" with the GH1(3).

Thanks.
 
I actually have never tried to convert 720 60p to 1080 60i, only 1080 24p.... I really
don't see the point of that.... if you need a camera that shoots 1080 60i then you should just use an ex1 or something I suppose....

I generally shoot 1080 24p native for most projects, and then sometimes I want slow motion, so I shoot the 720 60p and upconvert it to 1080 24p, and that works very well. Many people only have 720p tvs.... and many people are not that resolution sensitive and claim they can't see the difference between 720p and 1080p....

I think that's pretty crazy... I see a big difference on a 1080 monitor.... it's double the resolution (spatial.. not temporal.. meaning pixels)

I will shoot some 720 60p stuff and see if I can upconvert it to 1080i in sony vegas but... there would be no way for me to show you how it looks.... I guess I would have to send you the actual mp4... no streaming sites support i in any form.. your computer is a progressive display... so I don't even know what the hell goes on with 1080 60i honestly..... maybe Barry does...
 
I agree - I can easily see the difference between 720 and 1080 footage. As I mentioned, this is more for "fun" than anything else. I've got a couple of EX-1s at the shoot to capture the "video" look. Maybe I'll just do this on 24p and be done with it. Then again, it might be interesting to try a 720 60p shot and see how it looks.
 
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