720 or 1080?, tell us what & why
 

Since this camera has a lot of options, I think it would be interesting to see how & why people plan to shoot certain formats.

I would plan on using 720p 60fps for a lot of work as the slow-mo and output options seem like a great benefit over higher resolution. As I feel a lot of consumers will not see the difference.

Thanks for your input.

I'd be interested in shooting 720 60P and 1080 60i then use the fields kit
deinterlacer on the 60i for conversion to 1080 60p and see how the higher
resolution holds up against the 720.... in slo mo applications

theres a lot of flexibility with this cam...

I'm looking forward to shooting 720p60 footage as slow motion sequence which I plan to upres to 1080p25. Is that possible? I hope the 720 to 1080 upscaling doesn't look too terrible.

I've already gotten great results from Vegas 8 Pro... I have the project settings as Progressive, and Interpolate fields (60i to 30p) but if you choose exactly 50% slow motion (maybe anything between 50% and 100%) it will grab information from the fields it interpolated, so you get true slow-motion.

Basically, with a few settings in Vegas 8 you can get the same results as if you shot 1080p60 but with a 60i camera

Can you do that in CS3? Are you using a 50i project file or a 25p project?

In CS3, right click the footage on the timeline, choose field options, then deinterlace, then hit the enter key for it to recompile

Holy cow! It's that easy? And that turns the 50i into 25p? I'm away from my CS3 computer for a week or so unfortunately so I can't test it.

And I assume then that you do this in a 25p project file?

And am I right in assuming that it then doubles the duration? Or am I way off track?

If it does, do you think that shooting 720p50 and then upscaling to 1080p25 for a 1/2 speed slow motion effect would be better or would I be better off shooting 50i and then doing this "interpolate" thing?

John, your post is kind of why I started this thread.

There seems to be a lot of differeing opinions about what the best way to shoot with the different formats.

My main concern with with any framerate is the avoidance of jitter in the final product.

To me, 1080 lines of resolution means nothing if it looks jittery on an interlaced viewing device.

So, 720p60 seems like the safest bet, but I don't have an HD camera here to test with.

With DV, I never really liked going from interlaced to progressive, it just looks unatural to me, sort of forced.

John, If you bring in footage as 1920x1080 50i and deinterlace it with CS3 then you will have 1920x1080 50p footage.. not 25p footage.

The EX cam will record native 25p if thats what you want...

The idea is for non-interlaced footage to be utilized for slow motion work is to have as many frames as you can... so for the best slow motion footage from
the camera the max frame rate would be 60...

The only way to get 60p from this camera would be to shoot in 720 resolution mode ( native progressive ) or to shoot in 1920 resolution mode ( post deinterlacing ) HQ mode

So, we will just have to wait for us to test native 60p at 720 res against 60p at 1920 res deinterlaced post ingest to an NLE.

also to answer your question, the duration does not double for field conversions...

the only time the duration changes is when you start to play with the timing.. either speeding up the footage ( shorter duration ) or slowing down the footage ( longer duration )

What I'm looking forward to doing is shooting some 60p slow mo with the EX, then use Optical Flow slow motion to reduce speed by another 50% in FCS 2 Motion, then put this into a 25p timeline for 120fps slow motion (or almost 4 times slower than realtime).

Simon, could you elaborate, please? What is Optical Flow slo/mo - an Adobe thingy? Or Final Cut? (I'm a PC- Vegas guy)...Thanks!

Optical Flow is a fancy interpolative slow motion ability built into Final Cut Studio 2 Motion.

I haven't messed around with it too much, and it does seem to have its liminations. But basically it is like having Realvis Retimer built into the NLE system.

I dont know if the optical flow slow mo is the same thing but Revision Twixtor plugin for After Effects does very good slow mo as well. It creates additional frames by morphing adjacent frames into new frames. The recent AE version has this built in and its called Time warp. http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/slowmotion/

Sami

To be honest I've not had much success with these post production slow motion software in the past. I always find that they create strange warping effects if you try to go too slow.

Ive also noticed that with 50% slow mo even the most basic application will handle it pretty well. There is a slight difference but compared to the hours of render time with Twixtor and the immeadiate results with Sony Vegas for example it's often not worth it.

But I myself like the little warping effect (as I do art films mostly) and Ive used Twixtor effectively a lot. This guy has done amazing stuff with different AE plugins including twixtor http://www.kraak.net/en/releases.php?ID=29 (only fragment2 and 3 seem to work).

Sami