Do you always shoot weddings at 1080P/24p?

[George Kilroy]

"Just for interest do you shoot at 25P or 50P...it just worries me a little that at 1/50th shutter speed 25P might have a bit of motion blur if there is any fast movement...like the dancing when the party hots up???"

I have been shooting 720p 50fps at 1/50th but just lately I've started to shoot at 1/120th or even 1/250th in bright sun, instead of using the ND filter, as even at 50fps I can see that some of the footage has slight motion blur on any fast movement when shot at 1/50th. I couldn't use 25p as that exhibited motion blur that was very noticeable. In low light back to 1/50th I never shoot below that other than for a dream effect.

I've have small Sony cams that I use for additional coverage. They shoot 1080i and because of the problem I had with the Prog/inter mentioned above I've started shooting 1080-50i on my main cam.

My cam JVC HM700 in native 720p and will do 1080i but only does 1080p at 24fps and as almost everything goes out on DVD I'm not even going to enter that arena.

[Chris Harding]

Hey George

Here is the link to one of my tests

YouTube - ‪modetests.mp4‬‏

Ok it's just a static street directory but I was comparing resolution...basically all the AVCHD was rendered down to MPEG2 and for fun I shot a DV-AVI clip too (my cam can also shoot SD)
I then assembled all the SD clips and rendered them out to MP4 at a decent bitrate and dumped the clip on YouTube... None of the clips had any special treatment and I even transcoded one AVCHD with Upshift to 1920x1080 progressive so I could get a fair range of formats. I looked at this clip from my media player in HD and I really cannot say, with confidence, any one truly "shone"

Tell me what you think????? I can see the point of doing 720 50P or 25P if you want a special look but I think it just gets lost in SD!!! Admittedly I have shot my entire season at 1080i and then transcoded to HDV and finally rendered to MPEG2 and brides have been delighted..would they have been "more delighted" with 720 50P ?????

Chris

[George Kilroy]

Hi Chris.

The reason I have been shooting 720p is that that is the native capture format of my camera, the 1080i is processed in camera from that, as is the down-converted SD.

I couldn't see any real difference in resolution in your sample except for the AVI; did you change the w/b on that as it looks distinctly warmer than the others?

I don't really have a problem with any of the of the formats when kept in the computer/internet domain, all my worries come from DVD playback. Further to what I wrote yesterday I have read that a DVD with a Progressive MPEG stream should play okay on a non Progressive tv as the DVD player will do some magic techno trickery (that is what I been told previously) to output it in an interlaced way, but my eyes tell me something different, I see it with field jitter, even though it plays fine on a computer or on the internet.

[Chris Harding]

Hi George

Nope I left everything on auto ...I guess SD capture uses different settings in the camera (or confused it) the idea was purely to see if one resolution had a distinct advantage when resizing to 720x576... so far I'm not 100% convinced that 720 gives you a far better SD copy but I will continue testing with some "proper footage"

My NLE (Sony Vegas) allows me to set the output for a PAL MPEG2 destined for a DVD but it also has preset templates and all the PAL DVD ones apply interlacing if you are rendering progressive footage!! Remember even if I shoot 1080i I still de-interlace and edit it as progressive then purely let the NLE apply the interlacing on the final render.

Jaggies tend to show on TV footage if the file was, say, shot and edited as interlaced and THEN rendered out as a smaller size video.... Typical would be 1440 x 1080 interlaced being sent to a 720 x576 MPEG2 ..what happens is when the image is resized then the interlacing lines get messed up due to the resizing and show up on the TV .

Read this website and see if the images relate to your issue???

What is deinterlacing? The best method to deinterlace movies

They explain the resizing of interlaced video very clearly (far better than me!!!!) If you are getting this then maybe your 720 clips are actually 50P clips inside a 50i wrapper so they appear as interlaced to the NLE

Does your NLE recognise your video as Progressive showing fields as "none" ????

Chris

[George Kilroy]

Hi Chris.
It's not jaggies that are the problem it's as though it is playing the field order incorrectly. The HM700 chip is true Progressive capture and Premiere identifies it as such, editing is no problem. I can then encode it to MPEG2 for DVD. The presets offer a PAL Widescreen and a PAL Progressive Widescreen. The first is Field order Lower , the second is Field Order None. If I pick the Progressive as is the project the MPEG is fine it plays back without a hint of flutter or jitter, I put it to Encore and it's still fine, I make a DVD and play that back on the computer, still fine, put it in a laptop, still fine, but when I play it to a tv from a DVD player on any movement there's what appears to be the field order playing back incorrectly. which looking at it again is a slight de-focusing or ghosting. The DVD player is setup to output Progressive and the TV is indicating that it's receiving a Progressive input. I've tried it on two different DVD/TV combinations.
If I make the same DVD with a PAL Widescreen preset (i.e interlaced) it plays okay.

Apologies to all if I seem to be moving this thread away from the original question.

[Chris Harding]

Hi George

Very simple then!! Your DVD player cannot encode progressive video to interlaced for your TV..some can and some can't. Because with my luck, the very bride I deliver DVD's to has a non-compliant player so she will not think very much of me!!

I would use the PAL Widescreen preset so that you know you are safe... all my wedding footage is also progressive but I always render to PAL Widescreen so it's interlaced.

Chris

[George Kilroy]

That's what I fear Chris and I have had one couple tell me they had this problem. It's reverting back to the days when I first delivered DVDs and had compatibility problems with some machines not recognising +R and some -R discs.

I'm a relatively new comer to HD having made the switch mainly because I needed to supply widescreen, and I've still never been asked for HD. I was not an early adopter of any of the HDV formats so a whole swath of technology passed me by and when I finally did come around to it the variety of formats and media came as quite a culture shock. I had been use to running a DVcam tape, editing it with Prem 6.5, letting Matrox encode for DVD and burning to a disc.That seems like spreading soft butter on warm bread compared to HD which is like wading through treacle with chains on my legs and blinkers on. Excuse the mixed metaphors.

[Victor Boyko]

I shoot in 30p on my XH A1 and my 5D Mark II. I dont convert anything. I export final progect to MPEG2DVD usually. But as soon as I import it into Encore, I notice stuff gone wrong. When I playback on a television, you can definitively tell the field orders are incorrect. When I playback the DVD footage on a pc, quality is amazing. Does encore not support progressive? it seems it transcode to either lower or upper fields. Any advice for me? I want to deliver a product in progressive without getting my fields out of sync.

[Chris Harding]

Even if I shoot interlaced (which has an upper field first) I always transcode it so my timeline has progressive footage. Dunno about Encore but when I render out in Sony Vegas I render to an MPEG2 SD file and use their DVD preset (PAL in my case) The render properties show this always as Lower Field first plus of course the correct aspect etc etc.

That way I know I have the correct interlaced file to compile a DVD (for me in DVD Lab)

Play this on a computer and yes you will see the interlacing lines when you have movement... if your video looks absolutely pristine on the computer then you can be pretty sure that the file has no interlacing so a lot of DVD players will struggle with it!!

Chris

[Ray Pegram]

Guys,
Maybe you need to upgrade your computer. I shoot in AVCHD and MXF and it all goes straight onto the timeline in 720 50P in Vegas Pro10 nicely, my computer crunches these files all day.

I edit and then render to Blu-Ray specs (1080 X 1920 @ 25P). I then import the HD file into Architect Pro 5.2 put my chapters in and set it to burn either to a Blu-Ray or to a DVD. Depending on the time I either use a dual layer or single layer DVD and the program does the rest. I am more then happy with the result. I guess its a hang-up I have from the old days but I don't like going down a generation or two by converting even if it is digital.

Just by two bobs bit FWIW.

[George Kilroy]

Chris. If you shoot interlaced what is the advantage converting to Progressive if it is then going to be interlaced again for the DVD?

Ray, Surely there will be a downscaling conversion of your HD Blu-ray spec file when Architect crunches it for a DVD.

Since posting about the 'field jitter' problem I've allowed Encore to encode my Progressive 720x50p timeline as Lower Field First (presumably that is interlaced) and now I no longer have the problem. It seems my DVD/TV set ups don't handle Progressive DVDs, even though the players are set to output Progressive and the TV indicate that they are receiving Progressive signal through HDMI. Very odd.

[Chris Harding]

Hi George

I'm shooting in HD 1080 50i and therefore the interlacing is Upper Field first...I need to resize and out to Lower Field first eventually.

If you resize (from say 1440x1080 interlaced) down to 720x576 interlaced you also resize the interlacing lines and that throws them completely out of sync...that website I showed you 100fps shows you what happens. I have basically two options with interlaced...allow the NLE to de-interlace the footage which Sony Vegas can do automatically OR de-interlace before I import the footage which I'm currently doing with Upshift. The bottom line is that if you resize HD to SD you DO need to de-interlace the footage. If you shoot progressive then, of course, it has no interlacing.

I transcode the 50i in Upshift to MPEG2 HDV at 50mbps and also allow Upshift to make it progressive...I'd actually prefer to use the Canopus HQAVI Codec but that doesn't seem to have a de-interlace facility so then I would have to tell Sony Vegas to de-interlace it.

The bottom line is that you DO need to de-interlace footage if you are going to resize it..if, of course, you are editing 1920x1080 and outputting 1920x1080 then interlacing is not affected ..only an issue with HD to SD!!! and my brides all need DVD's!!!

Chris

[George Kilroy]

Thanks Chris, that explains it to me very well. I hadn't expected my migration from SD/DV to HD to be so tortuous, it seems I'm still learning.

I have been shooting Progressive 720x50p up until recently but because of the problem I'd had as I mentioned above I have shot may last few weeks at 1920x50i. I'm shooting PAL so presumably Upper Field First (that's what Premiere shows me). I haven't been deinterlacing, and as far as I know Premiere hasn't been doing it automatically, I set an 1920x1080 interlaced project. When I send it to Encore to encode at 720x576 for DVD it is doing that as Lower Field First yet I am not seeing any scaling artifacs or interlacing lines. The only time I've seen problems has been, as I mentioned before, when I've encoded Progressive footage to a Progressive MPEG and seen 'field jitter'

Very odd.

[Eric Olson]

When a reasonable DVD player encounters progressive source flagged for pulldown, it should apply a low pass filter in the vertical direction to remove interline twitter before splitting the progressive frame into fields during playback to a tube television. This assumes you have encoded your video as progressive with soft pulldown flags and the DVD player is reasonable. On the other hand, if you encode your video using hard pulldown with 60i progressive segmented frames, the low pass filter needs to be applied before encoding. Better quality will be obtained using flags rather than hard pulldown.

[George Kilroy]

Thanks Eric, but that's gone completely over my head. How/where do I apply flags.
I either send by Dynamic Link from Premiere to Encore, or encode with Media Encoder from Premiere, nowhere have I seen reference to pull down or flags.

Incidentally the jitter problem is on LCD & LED screens not CRT. But not when played on computers or laptops.