xl2 & making 24p dvd

[William LiPera]

My goal with the xl2 in 24p mode has been to make a 24p progressive dvd. Transfer to film is an unlikely event. So I shot in 24p 2:3:3:2 1/48sec, used dv film maker to remove the the extra frames(i.e. inverse telcine to convert to true 24p or 23.97) then took the resulting footage (as is , no editing) burned a dvd with Ulead workshop 2.0, played it back in a progressive scan dvd player with a HD monitor through component in and the motion artifacts (flicker) with even the slightest camera movement were terrible.Color and contrast were good, but again the flicker was unacceptable. What am I doing wrong? Has anyone made a good looking 24p dvd? Thanks

[Rob Lohman]

William: I've moved your thread to the DVD forum since it has
nothing (really) to do with the XL2.

I assume your progressive scan DVD player is correctly hooked
up to your HD monitor and plays the commercial "hollywoord"
discs okay?

If so then the problem is in either DV Film Maker or in Ulead.

How do the outputs from both Film Maker and from Ulead look
when played back on the computer? (So play the Film Maker
file and play the DVD that Ulead creates on the computer).

Are you sure both programs where setup to do 24p and not
some interlaced form for example?

What exact settings where you using? Most people I know who've
made a 24p DVD simply used something like Vegas + DVDA that
natively support the 24p DV workflow to produce 24p DVD's.

[William LiPera]

dv film maker converted 24p(23.97) footage looks good on the computer playing through quicktime. I think ulead workshop is the problem. What dvd burning programs burn 24p. The dvd player is in progressive mode and the tv is a panasonic hdtv with component input. Holywood made dvds play just fine. Thanks

[Rob Lohman]

I know for sure DVD Architect (Sony Vegas + DVDA bundle) does
it, but I assume you don't have that. I think Adobe's Encore might
have it, but since I'm not in 24p country I haven't really looked at
applications that (correctly) support it.

You say the output from DV Film Maker is in QuickTime? Can it
output in anything else like AVI as well? Or directly in MPEG2?
QuickTime is not really a "native" solution for the Windows
platform and might introduce extra problems, although I don't
expect that to be the problem.

I looked at the Ulead site:

http://www.ulead.com/dws/compare.htm

And it does claim 24 film compatability, so in theory it should
work. Are you running the latest update to the program? (ie
not the original CD version) Are you following the correct
workflow for 24p in that program (I assume you need to do
something special to get it to work correctly).

[William LiPera]

I spoke to ulead and they claim that 24p dvds do not exist. All dvds are 30 (29.97) fps . I understand and have made 24p dvds with 2:3 pulldown flags but the resulting jitter is terrible. Playing only the original 24 frames withou the added fields ( to arrive at 30 fps) would probably eliminate the jitter. But how do you do this, if it's even possible.

[Rob Lohman]

Oh it is possible. Why otherwise would they claim that their
product supports 24p?

As I said, Sony's DVD Architect and professional products that I
know fully support it.

In the case of 24 fps source, the encoder embeds MPEG-2 repeat_first_field flags into the video stream to make the decoder either perform 2-3 pulldown for 60Hz NTSC displays (actually 59.94Hz) or 2-2 pulldown (with resulting 4% speedup) for 50Hz PAL/SECAM displays. In other words, the player doesn't "know" what the encoded rate is, it simply follows the MPEG-2 encoder's instructions to produce the predetermined display rate of 25 fps or 29.97 fps.

Source: http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#3.4 (DVD FAQ 3.4)

It is also a known fact that encoding in 24 fps gives you an
almost 25% additional room on the DVD (to lower the compression
or to increase the time available), this can only happen if it is
encoded as 24 fps instead of 30 fps.

Perhaps it is time to switch to another DVD authoring application
and/or MPEG2 encoder?