Camera with Manual Control Recommendation" HF20,HG20, are those true Progressive?

[Andy Corleone]

Hi, Need some help in buying Cheap as possible HD camera with Manual Control, need to fully control Shutter Speed and Aperture Manually For Example Select F5 125/sec turn off the Camera and Turn On and Again Record in the same setting. (not sure If TV mode with Lock will work or will be hit and error until I get the right setting not happy with this)

HF20,HG20, are those true Progressive? I think some one told me some cameras claiming 24p are not true progressive.

Thanks

[Predrag Vasic]

All current (and for past two years) models of Vixia camcorders have progressive, true 24p. However, other than this year's (still unavailable) HF-S series, none of them record those 24 true progressive frames inside a proper 24p stream. Instead, they insert pull-down frames and this is then encoded into 60i. If you need to edit this material in a native 24p timeline, you'll need to transcode the original AVCHD into something else, removing the pull-down fields in the process. NeoScene does an excellent job of transcoding with pulldown removal.

[Geoff Kaiser]

Firstly, I can partly answer Andy's question; I have an HF100 which basically has the same OS as those cameras, and mine has a shutter priority mode and an aperture priority mode, but not a full manual setting to control both. And I can't set a SS of 125; the stops included in shutter priority mode, for example, are 2000, 1000, 500, 250, 100, 60, 30, 15, and 8. (in the aperture mode, apertures available are 8.0, 6.7, 5.6, 4.8, 4.0, 3.4, 2.8, 2.4, 2.0, and 1.8.)

However, when you dial in a setting, it is remembered after you shut down the camera and turn it back on later; you pick up where you left off, even including where the lens was zoomed to.

OK, secondly, I have a question for Predrag or whoever can answer this, about the 'progressive modes' in the Vixia series - there are three shooting modes, '24p', '30p' and 60i, although all three are apparently embedded in a 60i stream. Is this what they call "progressive segmented frames", where it's interlaced but the fields are identical instead of just upper or just lower??

Really what I'm interested to know is, if outside software like NeoScene can extrapolate 24p or 30p from 60i in cams like the Vixias, do I have to shoot my footage in one of those modes on the Vixia? In other words, if I have it set to 60i by default, can I ever get 24 or 30p out of that footage?