HD10 Semi-Review

[Jeff Kilgroe]

<<<-- Originally posted by Heath McKnight : So shooting on the HD10 is 30p? -->>>

Yes, in 720p HD mode. The HD1/HD10 have 3 shooting modes. The first is DV (regular NTSC) which is 29.97 frames per second. Each frame is composed of 2 interlaced fields - hence 60i (interlaced), this is not 30p. The next mode is SD 480p (progressive), but here's the kicker... It's 60p! So no interlaced fields, but full image frames running at 60fps. Then the last is it's 720p mode, which is 30 full frames per second, not interlaced.

And to address what Glenn wrote...

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Gipson : The 30fps you are talking about is actually 60 interlaced fields meshed together (and 50 interlaced fields for Pal.) Yes, when it is all said and done, 60 interlaced fields does play at 30fps (29.97, actually, I think), but this is not the same as 30 progressive frames per second, which is LITERALLY 30 “snapshots” per second, not simply 60 interlaced fields meshed together. The transfer houses can work with 60 interlaced fields (or 50 interlaced fields) to convert them to 24 fps, but they can not do this with 30p, at least not without problems. -->>>

For the most part, this is true. However it is possible to go from 30p to 24p with a few tricks. Simply dropping frames to achieve 24p gets real ugly as the transfer houses say. But I've done a couple 30p to 24p transfers by first interpolating the 30p footage to 60i by interpolating or tweening one field and combining motion blur. Results were fair and could be acceptable in certain situations. For our use, it worked, but we were converting animation frames that were rendered out at 30p instead of 60i and we didn't have time to re-render several minutes of animation (about 2 weeks of processing time on our network for this particular project). Depending on the video in question, it could work, or it could be a disaster.

I can understand the transfer houses' point of view of not wanting to do it though. In most cases, such a conversion would take a lot of time and still look like crap and they don't want to deal with it.

[Heath McKnight]

Which brings me to this: I don't plan on transferring either XL-1 or HD10 footage to film. As I stated in another thread, I only want to shoot my no-budget films with the camera (and freelance stuff on all three modes). I will shoot my next film, 9:04 AM, on my buddy's CineAlta. Because we are going to film with that movie.

heath