I'm thinking of trying out 30fps for a wedding I have coming up, as an experiment, and wanted to know, from those that have used it how it works out for you at weddings.

Tim, I believe you use it regularly. Do you have to adjust your shooting technique?

How does it work out for scenes with lots of movement, such as bouquet toss, dancing, etc?

Don't know but for sure it is not in Blu-ray spec so you will have to convert it later if you plan to do BD.

Thank you Khoi. This wedding will likely not be going to BR, but that is an important piece of info for the future.

Hi, Jeff . . .

I'm shooting with the Z7U, which is almost identical to the Z5U. The 30p frame rate is fantastic for my projects.

I used to shoot most everything 60i. Now I'm shooting almost everything using the native 30p (not 30p scan mode) frame rate. I've used it for many weddings and other events that have some rapid movement -- and this poses no problems. If , however, you decide to shoot 24p, you will likely have issues with video that is far too "studdery" in many cases with movement.

30p, for me, gives a project a natural look while at the same time giving it a filmic feel.

I've had no problem outputting 30p projects to both DVD and Blu-ray disc. I'm editing in Vegas 8c and authoring using DVD Architect 5a.

If you are new to the camera, you might check out the Z7U training DVD (also marketed I see for the Z5U, since most settings and features are identical) from Doug Jensen at Vortex Media - www. vortexmedia.com. His DVD is fantastic and he really does a great job of showing what shooting at different frame rates will look like. He's a good shooter, so it will also show you how capable the camera is.

Have a great shoot. Let us know if you shoot 30p and how you liked the result.

Ian

Use it all the time when I had my canon. Just be careful when panning across with no movement. You just have to pan a little slower than you would with 60i to reduce the judder. If your following someone or something then no problem. If you ever go to Bluray just render your 30P out to 60i and your good to go. Just be warned once you shoot 30P you will not be to fond with 60i afterwards. I still use 60i when I have to but 30P most of the time.

Monday

Thanks guys. I'm excited to try it out, it sounds very promising.

Tim A had touted the "niceness" of the 30p and I just didn't want to think about it for awhile as I had too much on my plate. I had tried 24p but it was too stuttery for my taste, but 30p as Tim described it sounded very nice.

Jeff, no problems here, you will love it and I see you using 30p from now on. The only thing you will have to watch is super slo-mo. 50% is ok, but under that and it starts to stutter. I have also used 30 shutter speed with 30p at receptions with no problems with the fast dancing.

That's good to hear Tim, thanks.

We had the conversation about dealing with pulldown removal before, but I've forgotten it all. Tell me how are you doing it? Or are you editing the footage as is?

No puldown removal with 30p, that's 24p. Just make sure the project properties are set to 30 progressive.

Excellent news! Thanks, Tim.

Forgive me guys for jumping in right at the end here, but with a FX7 do i have an option of adjusting frame rate? What is the purpose of reducing the frame rate from 60 to 30??

Just trying to learn and understand.

You are not reducing frame rate, 60i is 60 fields per second (interlaced), in 1 frame you have 2 fields, so it is 30 frame per second, 30P is progressive, has no field, still 30 frame per second.

Jeff, here's a link to the highlight video from my daughters wedding. It was shot in 30p. It should give you some idea about the slow motion. All the reception shots were shot with shutter speed at 30 everything else at 60.

I set a password so our daughter can't see it, she has to watch it with us when she comes home Thursday.

password: avp1

This is a password protected video on Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/4061452)

Jeff, here's a link to the highlight video from my daughters wedding. [/url]

So you were the one taping her wedding? It came out nice. But I think if it were me, I'd rather let someone else do it, so I could be a part of the day, and not stuck behind a viewfinder.

Very nice Tim, very smooth, but I see what you mean about the slow motion, tad rough.

DR, I hired two photographer friends to do most of the shooting for me. I thought they did a great job, I was very pleased.

Very nice Tim, very smooth, but I see what you mean about the slow motion, tad rough.

I agree about the slow motion it is rough, I shoot 60i and I want to shoot 30p but I am not sure if I can use any slow mo effect for that reason.

I tried shooting some test footage recently in native 30p with my Z7U. While I like the results of the shots in normal speed (more film like), I do not like them when I use Premiere Pro to add slow motion to any of these shots, whether they pan, tilt, zoom, whatever. There's just too much jitter. Has anyone out there had successful results with doing slow motion on 30p shots on post?

On the plus side, I have done tests editing 30p shots in Premiere and outputting to Encore with great results on both DVD and Blu-Ray. No interlacing artifacts and clean footage on either workflow. If it just wasn't for the crappy slow motion...

I do all my wedding works in 30p. It's a nice balance between 60i and 24p. No home video-ish like in 60i, and no worry about pulldowns as in 24p.

30p is not the standard on DVD or Bluray. But the video stream can definitely be treated as 60i. Most encoders will split the 30p full frame into 60i two fields half frame. In that case there is no quality loss.

For slow motion, Premiere will default blend frames to get a better slow motion. But 60i still yield much better slomo results. I have two videos here you can take a look. Both are 50% slow motion but one is made from 60i and the other is 30p.

Video 1
LA Color - Wedding Photography and Videography serving Great Los Angeles Areas (http://lacolor.com/video/photos/?id=SocheataVu)

video 2
LA Color - Wedding Photography and Videography serving Great Los Angeles Areas (http://lacolor.com/video/photos/?id=JessicaPeter)

See if you can tell the difference and which is which.

Jeff,

I've shot exactly one wedding, but it was in 30F on the A1 and edited in Vegas 8c. Worked great. I personally feel 30fps is better than 24 except for the files are bigger. Smoother and better panning. I also haven't figured out how to get 24F to work with Vegas 8, there must be a pulldown that's not required for 30F; but Sony won't give me the magic decoder ring and tells me to contact Canon????

Have you found 30F better than 60i for much of your work? I keep going back and forth on the two, especially if I want to use slo-mo. 60i looks very good all the time, 30F look extremely good until you get sloppy with the pans, or overdo slo-mo.

I haven't tried blu-ray with 30F, but was told you could convert or render to 60i (in Vegas?) and it would just duplicate each frame at 60fps onto blue-ray 60i. Haven't tried yet or compared to shot in 60i rendered 60i blu-ray.

I think 30p or 24p both adopted the same data rate on HDV, 25mps. So both of them should give you the same file size... approx 13GB per hour.

I like 30p much better than 60i. These days clients all want to see some part of their videos online. Shooting 30p saves time by not having to deinterlace footage for web. It also has a semi-film like look like 24p.

Taky, thank you for the quick reply and posts, I appreciate it. It looks to me like the first video is 30p and the second one is 60i, let me know if I'm right. I still like the smoothness of 60i for doing slo-mo. However, I also like the film style look of 30p, but not when adding slo-mo in post, it just appears a bit too jerky for me. Now, if I could afford the XDCAM EX1 and do slo-mo in the camera, that would be nice. I think I may try 30p on a project where I won't be doing slow motion and see how that goes first.

That's right. the first video was shot in 30p and the second one is in 60i.

For now, since I will be doing a photo session with the wedding couple in the afternoon that will always turn into this slomo piece, I will switch to 60i. Otherwise, everything will be in 30p. Just have to practice not to pan or smooth too fast.

Taky,

You may be right on the data density, I was jumping ahead to converting to .wmv or H.264 for upload. At that point 24P is significantly less data than 30F (say 6Mbps vs 8 Mbps).

If you are using constant bit rate, the overall file size should be the same no matter it's 1fps or 100fps. Just more data bandwith is allocated to each frame for a lower frame rate video, thus the image quality will be better. So for the same data rate, you can say 24fps will yeild a better video than a 30fps video. But the file size should be the same.

That would be different if VBR is used. It's because of the complex algorithm and the inter-frame compression that reduce the amount of data.

I could be wrong. So if you know, please share your knowledage.

:)

If I record in 30p, I assume I should use the settings in Premiere for 30p to import, but what are the best settings to export & use Encore.

Thanks in advance.

Allen

Hey Ian,
I have been trying both the 24P and 30P and when I put them to slow motion im noticing studdering and not sure why im getting this filming on CF Cards.
My old pd-150's never had this problem and shooting at 60 shutter or higher Im seeing this still.
All great lighting, slow motion at 50 or 60%, edit in FCP to Blu-Ray or SD.

Hi, Jeff . . .

I'm shooting with the Z7U, which is almost identical to the Z5U. The 30p frame rate is fantastic for my projects.

I used to shoot most everything 60i. Now I'm shooting almost everything using the native 30p (not 30p scan mode) frame rate. I've used it for many weddings and other events that have some rapid movement -- and this poses no problems. If , however, you decide to shoot 24p, you will likely have issues with video that is far too "studdery" in many cases with movement.

30p, for me, gives a project a natural look while at the same time giving it a filmic feel.

I've had no problem outputting 30p projects to both DVD and Blu-ray disc. I'm editing in Vegas 8c and authoring using DVD Architect 5a.

If you are new to the camera, you might check out the Z7U training DVD (also marketed I see for the Z5U, since most settings and features are identical) from Doug Jensen at Vortex Media - www. vortexmedia.com. His DVD is fantastic and he really does a great job of showing what shooting at different frame rates will look like. He's a good shooter, so it will also show you how capable the camera is.

Have a great shoot. Let us know if you shoot 30p and how you liked the result.

Ian