Progressive or interlaced video for weddings?

[Tom Hardwick]

Weddings? 50i every time. It's just smoother, and brides like looking smooth. It's possibly less sharp ultimately, but these days we have sharpness to spare. And I find 50i drops into progressively varying slo-mo much more attractively than 25p.

Sections of the film (the suits strutting their stuff for instance) can look good masked down from the film's 1.78:1 to 2:1, and these look good in 25p. But then again these bits of the day aren't supposed to look 'real', and vignetting, slo-mo, sepia tints and so on all come together here.

tom.

[Stelios Christofides]

Hi
Do I have this choice with my camera (Sony FX7)?

Stelios

[Tom Hardwick]

You certainly do.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Hollywood shoots 24P. Agreed. But when distributing their movies on DVD everything is back to 50i or 60i. Where is the value added, especially when displayed on a interlaced CRT TV?

Doing the conversion at the last part of the chain means that you can fit more on a DVD. Less compression = nicer video. Or more material, or better audio.

To me, that's the value added.

[Harm Millaard]

Can you explain that. It seems to me that encoding to MPEG2 at X Mbps has nothing to do with interlaced or progressive.

[Bill Edmunds]

Originally Posted by Ian Holb

I've shot footage in 25P and converted it to 60i, easily. (The only downside is rendering time as Compressor has to rebuild the missing frames, but that's merely a function of processing power.)

I just tried it and it certainly works very well. However, it took my dual 1ghz G4 almost 4 hours to convert a 1 minute clip!!!! I know the G4 is not state of the art anymore, but will the new Intel chips make a huge difference in processing time? If I convert a 90 minute 24p movie, would that take days to finish even on a modern Duo-core machine?

[Adam Hoggatt]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Can you explain that. It seems to me that encoding to MPEG2 at X Mbps has nothing to do with interlaced or progressive.

I think he was talking about framerate.

If you have encoded video that's 30 FPS and your bitrate is 7000Kbps then each frame gets 233k. If the video is 24FPS then each frame gets 291k (basically). So the quality of each frame is increased at a lower frame rate.

[Harm Millaard]

Originally Posted by Adam Hoggatt

I think he was talking about framerate.

If you have encoded video that's 30 FPS and your bitrate is 7000Kbps then each frame gets 233k. If the video is 24FPS then each frame gets 291k (basically). So the quality of each frame is increased at a lower frame rate.

If I understand it correctly, the point is moot when discussing 25P versus 50i, or 30P versus 60i.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

If I understand it correctly, the point is moot when discussing 25P versus 50i, or 30P versus 60i.

Perhaps so. But I was comparing 60i (typical for NTSC broadcast in the US) to 24p (which seems reasonable for Hollywood or independent releases).

By shooting 24p instead of 60i, it is possible to use less compression and get a better quality product in the same amount of space.

I see that as added value.

[Stelios Christofides]

Originally Posted by Tom Hardwick

You certainly do.

Tom How? I have looked in the manual and I couldn't find a way to do so.

Stelios

[K.C. Luke]

Originally Posted by Stelios Christofides

Hi
Do I have this choice with my camera (Sony FX7)?

Stelios

Sorry it does not support progressive mode. Only progressive 25p on HVR-V1U.

http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/ar...comparison.htm

[Adam Hoggatt]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Perhaps so. But I was comparing 60i (typical for NTSC broadcast in the US) to 24p (which seems reasonable for Hollywood or independent releases).

By shooting 24p instead of 60i, it is possible to use less compression and get a better quality product in the same amount of space.

I see that as added value.

Exactly what I was getting at.

[Ian Holb]

Originally Posted by Bill Edmunds

I just tried it and it certainly works very well. However, it took my dual 1ghz G4 almost 4 hours to convert a 1 minute clip!!!! I know the G4 is not state of the art anymore, but will the new Intel chips make a huge difference in processing time? If I convert a 90 minute 24p movie, would that take days to finish even on a modern Duo-core machine?

The 8-core Mac Pro should be about 9-12 times faster than your machine. Per GHz, Intel is about 25% faster than a similarly clocked G4.

If you're converting programs 90 minutes or so in length, you're better off shooting 50i/60i in the future and doing 24P conversions in post. Faster and better quality.