I have acquired a ton of footage at 1080p 60fps in AVC-HD from a Canon XA-25.

Everything is edited and ready to export to Blu-Ray. I am going with H.264 since it performs better at lower bit rates (I have too much footage and only 50 GBs to work with. :) ).

So, if YOU were going from 1080p 60fps source footage, which of the following would you render to for Best Picture Quality:

1080p 23.976 fps
1080i 29.97 fps
720p 59.94 fps

I have just exported my first sequence to 1080p 23.976 fps to see if the 60p to 24p conversion will be a deal breaker for me.

What are your thoughts?

OK, I made a test disc that included about 10 minutes of various footage rendered out of Premiere into the three formats above. I put them all onto one Blu-Ray disc using Adobe Encore CS6 and even created a quick title menu that linked to each of the encoded videos. Here's what I learned:

1080p 23.976 fps is not good. I knew that 24 fps would flicker slightly, but I underestimated the amount. My brain got used to it after about 5 minutes, but then I switched it to the 1080i 29.97 and it was buttery smooth with a crisp clean picture quality. So, I have ruled out 1080p for this project just due to the frame rate.

1080i 29.97 fps is great. I think this is my favorite. Very clean pretty picture.

720p 59.94 fps is great too. But why lower the resolution if it's not needed.

My final decision is this: When converting 1080p 59.94 fps AVC-HD encoded video to Blu-Ray, 1080i 29.97 is the way to go. The H.264 at 15 Mbps is beautiful too.

This is really a no-brainer. It's 1080i. 720p you're throwing away around half your resolution. 24p you're throwing away around 20% of your frames.

Chet, these are aesthetic choices depending upon what type of project you are working on. For example:

If this was a drama, you might choose 24p
If this was news footage you might choose 1080i
If this was sports footage you might choose 720p60

HD cameras give you options which then forces you to decide what look you want. I prefer the look of 720p60 over 1080i. Visually, with regards to resolution, they are pretty much even when they get to the television. But the look of the 720p60 footage is a little less "flickery" to me.

Regarding your 24p attempt. There is a certain way to handle this framerate to get less judder & flicker. A lot of it is in the shooting technique (pans need to be very slow or have a subject to draw the attention of the viewer) but encoding and authoring come into play as well. When you watch a movie on DVD or Blu-ray this format is fine, but often times a program like Encore will spit out a flicker-fest without testing for the best settings.

The only way to know is to do what you have already started, test, test, test.

Yeah, the 720p wasn't bad, but it wasn't exactly 1080i either. Just a slightly bit softer. I even made sure to go into the settings of the BD player and set it to output native (so that it's not upscaling 720p to 1080p). The TVs now-a-days do a great job of displaying 1080i without any visible combing.

Yes 1080i 29.97fps retains all the smooth motion of 60P and the TV fills in the missing fields.

Ron Evans