50i in low light - Any advantages over 60i?

[John Laird]

I was just curious whether shooting with 50i in low light on a Z1 had any advantages over 60i due to a slower shutter speed. I wondered what you guys think. I fix my shutter speed at 60 or 50. Lately, I've been playing with CF25 and Cineform's 25P->24P conversion in Vegas. The results have been fantastic! Motion is very smooth and everything I was looking for.

John

[Carlos E. Martinez]

Originally Posted by John Laird

I was just curious whether shooting with 50i in low light on a Z1 had any advantages over 60i due to a slower shutter speed. I wondered what you guys think. I fix my shutter speed at 60 or 50.

There shouldn't be any differences, except for a slight more open shutter which is compensated for the different framing.

What you should worry about is when you shoot 60i in a 50Hz country (or viceversa) and your light is standard fluorescents. You will get flickering. There's no problem with the new electronic ballast types.

BTW: I could cure a shoot I had, using 60i in a 50Hz country, with VirtualDub. The flickering vanished, and with no apparent price.

[Mikko Lopponen]

It will use less compression so it should look a tiny bit better. Pal uses a 12 gop mpeg2 and ntsc uses 15.

[Boyd Ostroff]

That issue came up back when the Z1 was introduced. When Adam Wilt reviewd the camera he performed a test where a 60i FX1 and 50i Z1 were gaffer-taped together while shooting a variety of scenes. After examining the results he concluded there was no noticeable difference whatsoever. If you've ever had the pleasure of meeting or working with Adam, you would know that he's incredibly thorough in everything he does, so I'll take his word on this one. He summed it up by saying

...the image quality in both modes was roughly equivalent for the same scene content. Indeed, I was hard-pressed to tell them apart in terms of artifacts or image degradation. A 20 percent difference in data available per frame may sound significant, but the comparison is more appropriately made between one image compressed around 50 X and the other compressed roughly 48 X: Both pictures have been squeezed to within an inch of their lives...