Hi, newbie here

I bought a Z1P and live in New Zealand (PAL). I am an artist interested in new media output including HD video. I am wondering about using 50i versus 60i - I started out at 50i but the more I think about it the more 60i sounds like the right choice for me. So I asking for advice from those with some real experience and understanding of the issues.

The reaons for 60i seem to me:

1. Given the resolution is the same (unlike SD NTSC vs PAL) there is nothing to lose and more frames to gain.

2. Converting to 24p does not sound a good option should I want to later (perhaps 50i might have been better for that).

3. Cinemotion 30 is said to be not too bad should I want that option (actually I think I will be staying with 60i, why not).

My intended use is displaying video via a good HD projector ie the projector is going to be able to work with either format. This is not a home-tv / dvd product though I do expect high end tv / dvd to support both formats ok anyway.

Do correct me if I am off with any of the above - too much reading and not enough experience on my part, but I am definitely interested in learning to do it well :-). The Z1P cost me 4x as much as my car, it's got to be put to good use!

Andrew

Hi Andrew, I'm a New Zealander currently living in Michigan - so I share your dilemma to some extent (although I have a 720p30 JVC camera so I'm not in quite the same boat).

The answer to your question depends in part on what possible future uses you might want to put your footage to. For example, can you envisage it being broadcast, in NZ or overseas? Do you want to make down-rezzed SD DVDs for friends in NZ, or overseas. And so on...

In terms of your own viewing, given that you have both 50i and 60i capability I doubt that you will find one is noticeably better than the other. There are some threads about this that I'm too lazy to find right now... some suggested that the slower framerate would produce better images as the bits available per field/frame would be higher, but others doubted that would be so. Anyway, you are in a good position to test that for yourself!

With regard to burning SD DVDs, not may Americans have players and/or TVs that will cope with PAL disks, whereas my impression in Europe and the Pacific is that a lot of the PAL equipment is also NTSC-capable. So filming at 60i with a view to producing NTSC DVDs might be a more flexible option in terms of being viewable overseas.

Software like Procoder is arguably slightly better at converting 60i to 50i. Although conversely, an awesome little utility had just been released that will allow you to put PAL-sourced 25fps progressive footage on a DVD and play it happily at 29.97fps on an NTSC standalone player by doing tricky things with the mpeg pulldown flags: http://neuron2.net/dgpulldown/dgpulldown.html

That's probably not much help...just my $0.02. How's the weather? - soggy snow here! Yuk!

Hi Graham

Thanks for the reply. The weather has been superb the last few weeks, sunshine with just a touch of cool breeze, I've been taking photos and video of the long golden grass in my ungrazed fields. It's a dream to walk around at this time of the year.

For me the be all and end all is optimising the quality for the best delivery equipment mix - by which I mean displaying with a good HD projector or plasma screen. Delivery will be either direct from a laptop or using the (future) Blu-Ray discs.

I might also want to create copies at lesser resolutions eg SD, but any choices as to what to actually shoot in should be geared towards the high end delivery.

Andrew