30fps and Weddings

[Tim Akin]

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.

[Michael Ojjeh]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

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.

[Stephen Gradin]

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...

[Taky Cheung]

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

video 2
LA Color - Wedding Photography and Videography serving Great Los Angeles Areas

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

[Roger Shealy]

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.

[Taky Cheung]

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.

[Stephen Gradin]

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.

[Taky Cheung]

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.

[Roger Shealy]

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).

[Taky Cheung]

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.

:)

[Allen Bartnick]

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

[David Ethridge]

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.

Originally Posted by Ian Campbell

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