Quality comparison of 24p and 60p
 

Does anyone have any image quality comparisons of 24p and 60p? I bought the 200U to switch to 60p, but I am a bit disappointed at the visual quality of my final pictures. I am almost certain my HD100 looks better at 30p than my HD200 at 60p. 'Better' of course is an ambiguous term; in this case, it references noise and encoding artifacts.

I have a simple, non-scientific, shot in the backyard test I could throw up tonight or tomorrow.

If you have some footage throw it up so we can see what your working with. Would like to see the HD100 30p stuff.

I'll put up png grabs tonight. To be fair, the conditions were stressing the codec (60p, 1/250th, lots of bg detail, single color high-speed moving objects), but I really expected better performance than I got; the artifacts are comparable to a consumer dvcam. I'm wondering if I should have shallowed up the dof to reduce the data needed for the bg pattern.

Jad,

The severe macro blocking in JVC's HDV 720p60 hasn't really been reported up to this point.

After shooting a full year and a half I too have been most disappointed with the codec. The image really falls apart during sudden changes. All you have to do is point the camera at a bush and swipe your hand in front of the lens. Then look at the results frame by frame in post and you will see the poor results of the long GOP method.

So yes, 720p30 mode (which has a shorter GOP) actually performs better than 720p60 during scenes with a lot of movement- effectively negating the whole purpose of 60 fps.

Now I wish I had bought two HD250's instead of two 200's as that SDI out suddenly becomes extremely relevant.

This is what I was afraid of.

I'm hoping JVC may announce something at NAB to remedy this situation. I believe the lens and ccd are more than sufficient for my purposes for the next 12 months, but the macroblocking at 60p (my target framerate) is becoming a dealbreaker.

wow.

and all that talk of how much better the blue channel is on the super encoder had me rethinking my HD100 purchase.

I'll stick with what works.

If your testing the blue channel by shooting a chart or a still scene then yeah, it looks totally amazing. It's when you start running and gunning that all the macro blocking occurs. Photo flashes in particular completely destroy the image for about three frames thereafter.

The 720p60 HDV codec is more than adequate for well lit talking heads and talk show style interviews- in fact would be nearly impossible to improve upon.

Yup the 50/60p is only good
 

on static objects, which is not obviously its intended target, shot a whole 2 day equine event with it and never again, 25p with a higher shutter speed for me from now on. And if you do, make sure your nle is good with it, I used Vegas 8.0b and it sucks with 50p, if I exported as anything other than a 50p uncompressed AVI, and then reimported it back into DVDA as a 25pSD project, it would have like a ghost effect on the image and was unusable, at one point I thought I'd have to buy a new NLE just to do the job, but after much pain and aingst mucking around I got it to work. It meant a 10Gb per minute of footage render.
The 50/60p though will mean something when the convergent design is released, I think this is truly the next biggest advancement in the prosumer video market, my 251 with 4:2:2 uncompressed audio at multiple bit rates. Then the 50/60p would also be National Geographic friendly ;-P

Here are a few stills:
http://www.metrofilmclub.com/i/cks08

http://www.metrofilmclub.com/i/cks08...09_mrdirty.png
is the worst

Yep, those are bad, indeed. To be fair, though, how does 60p look IN MOTION? Could you Vimeo a short clip or two so we can take a real look?

I've had very similar experiences with my HD110. I shoot a lot of panoramic views, outdoors. Background vegetation has a high degree of detail, trees and bushes. Combine the high level of detail with panning motion and the GOP encoding falls on its face. In these cases, I've found I dislike the motion blurring, as it looks worse. Shooting with a shutter speed of 125 helps, going to 250 improves the issue even more. Of course, the cadence is lost, but, that's a far smaller visual penalty than the macroblocks you've seen.

I put this together a while ago. May be interesting here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=102198

Thank you so much!

Not sure what to think... the rippling of the shirt looks unnatural (almost as if it runs in reverse) in EVERY clip. Maybe I'm still too interlaced. Decisions, decisions...

Mr. Clean and Mr Dirty both look the same to me.

mrclean is an I-frame
mrdirty is not

you'll have to zoom in to notice it

I've had very mixed results with 60p, and I've settled into a routine, where I use the slowest frame rate that is appropriate for the situation. I've only used 60p professionally for overcranking.
Mind you, I've been pretty happy with that.
But I've had mosquito noise macro blocking turn up in unusual situations. Large areas of a consistent mid to dark color can be a trigger for ugly moving patterns of artifacts. I think it handles a more complex scene better, which is counter-intuitive. A complex moving scene analyzed frame by frame will have some artifacts for sure, but I've found it mostly quite acceptable in motion and overcranked slo-mo.
What worries me most about the 60p artifacts is continuing through a workflow that compresses them again. Lots of what I shoot gets down-converted, and re-compressed to mpg2 again for SD DVD. This additional transcoding stress (which can be minimized, but rarely avoided completely for the end viewer), makes all noticeable compression artifacts far worse.

In the end, it's perfectly logical. You don't get something for nothing. OK, I KNOW you pay more for the 200 series, and I believe it is better overall, at the same framerates, to the 100 series. But obviously when you double the GOP, and cram twice as many (or more) frames into 19mbs you have to expect some compromises. I think it's safe to say that a 100 at 30p WILL have some picture quality advantages over a 200 at 60p. It's just number crunching logic, and 14bits only does so much.

I'll try to get some examples of my claims posted, but I'm in zombie land now. Got to get up in a little over 4 hours, and haven't been getting my beauty sleep at all this week.

Mr Clean vs. Mr Dirty
 

Obviously I'm seeing macroblocking but it's not TERRIBLE...

when shooting 30P on an HD100U I'm not having these compression issues.

is this all a 60P issue on the 200/250?

Yes. It's because of the longer GOP for 60p (12 frames as opposed to 6 for 30/24p)

I thought that the quality might be nearly equal considering that while there are twice as many frames, there is half as much movement in each frame. Of course, for high shutter movement, this all falls apart. 20mbit mpeg2 w/ gop12 is simply inadequate for 60p high shutter capture. Time to look at an XDCAM I gue$$

I'll drop back to 24p in the meantime.

Sony HDV uses a GOP of 15 for 1080i and we all know how well that holds up under motion. I'd almost wager its worse than the 60P of JVC.

I wonder what the GOP of the 1080P recording mode of XDCAM is.

how does it hold up?

If they can add 1080i to the firmware, why can't they add 35mbps or some sort of intra? I'm very frustrated that they didn't announce any product improvements at nab