Shooting Weddings in 30p and Authoring Bluray

[Jeff Harper]

Now you're talking about 30p footage in a 60i wrapper, but I thought you said you shoot in real unwrapped 30p, so I'm confused.

I need to bow out, I'm clearly lost here, sorry for the confusion. I have no need for 30p so I'll leave it for you guys...

[Nigel Barker]

Here in PAL-land we definitely have a need for 25p which is the TV standard. We could shoot 24p as that is supported on Blu-ray but unfortunately not all cameras here support 24p out of the box. If I want 24p on my Canon XF105 or XF305 I would have to pay Canon a few hundred extra for a simple firmware update that enables 24p (30p too) & frankly I don't like being screwed by a camera manufacturer like that so refuse to pay the NTSC tax.

[Katie Fasel]

I actually didn't realize that Bluray supported 720 / 60p.

Last season we shot in 720p because we were only offering DVDs, and from testing, that yielded the nicest results in downconverting to us...Now we're going to be offering Bluray soon, and I wanted the advantage of the full 1080 frame, and I'm not a fan at all of interlaced footage, especially when downconverting to DVD. I have never had luck with that process, thus we chose to try out 30p.

Now I'm thinking maybe we should just stick to 720p since it is bluray compatible. I like having the slow motion advantage of shooting in 60p for sure.

At Tim -- So you use compressor to compress a bluray version, and a separate dvd version, and then eventually toss the uncompressed quicktime, right? Do you use the MPEG Elementary settings, or H.264? I did one as MPEG Elementary once and it seemed to take a very long time, but everyone says h.264 takes longer?

[Adam Gold]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Adam, thanks for your post. I was referring to shooting in 30p when the final product will be 60i, and how it seems unnecessary (unless that is all you have available, etc).

No one was talking about (I wasn't anyway) converting 60i to 30p.

I wasn't either, not really. My point was that 30p rendered as 60i (i.e. for BD) will (should) look totally different than anything originally shot in 60i, because the fields match. It should still look like 30p and won't resemble 60i at all.

[Jeff Harper]

Adam, I misunderstood your earlier post apparently. I had asked what the advantage of shooting in 30p and then converting to 60i, and you just explained it in a way I understand.

What you say does make sense, I suppose.

Katie, yes 720 60p is nice, but there are those that think the higher resolution of 1080i is better even though it's interlaced. As I've read it explained, there are pros that feel strongly on each side of the debate.

I do like 720 60p, it is nice, but I haven't seen any of my work shot in 1080i yet as I haven't edited the projects yet. Same with my 24p weddings. I am most anxious to see the 1080i weddings I've shot but am still weeks away from editing those.

[Tim Bakland]

Again,

As my first post shows, I obviously wasn't quite aware of the blu-ray capabilities, but I'm pretty picky about final quality, and 30p -- through the workflow of Compressor (H.264 Blu Ray) to Encore (no Transcode) to Toast (for final burn of disc image -- as I like to keep disc images archived) works great for me and yields beautiful results. I also thought that 30p was the best way for DVD and blu-ray projects, but maybe that was wrong, too?

[Dustin Moore]

It all depends on what you want it to look like in the end. Video is usually 60 frames or
fields a second and it looks smooth. Film is 24 or 30 frames per second and it has
judder. If you want to deliver a product that has film judder as opposed to video smoothness
(an entirely aesthetic decision), you should feel free to capture 30p and then let your
NLE rewrap it to 60i.

Now if you expect to get more resolution this way, you are probably making a mistake on
the TV end. The TV has to deinterlace the "60i" to 60p and it does not expect to be fed 30p
wrapped in 60i which has more vertical resolution that a 30i stream. Whether the deinterlacer
will pass all of that resolution without seeing it as aliasing is anyone's guess. The deinterlacer
might try to filter down the resolution to avoid line-flicker or motion problems.

I don't do wedding videos but in my event videos my customers would not like the "effect" of shooting at
a low frame rate. It simulates the judder that one gets from a cheap cell phone or iphone like
camera which is fine for the web but it's not "video" IMHO. If you want the Bluray to have the
full "live" feel, 1080/60i or 720/60p capture is the way to go. If you want the Bluray to
feel like a low-temporal resolution web video, cell phone video or film, 30p might be alright. If
you only care what the video looks like on the web, 30p is great because then you don't have
to use a quality deinterlacer to make the web version.

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Dustin Moore

my customers would not like the "effect" of shooting at a low frame rate. It simulates the judder that one gets from a cheap cell phone or iphone like camera which is fine for the web but it's not "video" IMHO.

Agreed.

why not record 60i instead of 24p?

[Nigel Barker]

Eric & Dustin, sorry but I find your ideas nonsensical. Shooting at 24/25/30 progressive in no way "simulates the judder that one gets from a cheap cell phone or iphone like camera". Shooting interlaced is a hangover from requiring interlaced material for display on CRTs. Modern screens are all progressive. The cameras that we use extensively (Canon DSLRs) don't even shoot in interlaced mode.

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

Shooting interlaced is a hangover from requiring interlaced material for display on CRTs. Modern screens are all progressive.

CRTs were interlaced to reduce the bandwidth of the signal required to feed them. 1080i30 blu-ray is interlaced for the same reason. While 720p60 has the same motion characteristics and bandwidth requirements as 1080i30, the apparent resolution is lower. In event situations where lifelike motion is important you don't find people shooting 24, 25 or 30 fps progressive video. Whether a wedding is such an event is a matter of opinion that may depend on the style of wedding, available light as well as artistic taste.

[Nigel Barker]

Just to revisit this discussion & correct some of the misconceptions posted. Video whether progressive or interlaced is always shot at a frame rate of 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC) or 24fps (film look). If it's interlaced then the field rate is double as each field is interlaced with its partner to give a full frame. So progressive paints the lines on the screen 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc & interlaced paints 1,3,5 then 2,4,6.

There are many drawbacks to interlaced materials not least that all screens nowadays are progressive & thus introduce the need for de-interlacing which can introduce artefacts. The faster refresh rate may improve the look of motion but only if the source material supports it. Peter Jackson is shooting The Hobbit at 48fps & evidently this does improve the look but this is progressive not interlaced.

It's nonsense to say that shooting at at 24/25/30fps progressive "simulates the judder that one gets from a cheap cell phone or iphone like camera". It just doesn't & as evidence all cinema movies & many TV shows are shot at 24fps (film or progressive video).

[Dustin Moore]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

There are many drawbacks to interlaced materials not least that all screens nowadays are progressive & thus introduce the need for de-interlacing which can introduce artefacts.

This drawback mainly affects web video because programs like Premier and so on do not have the
basic adaptive deinterlacers found in modern televisions. You are unlikely to be able to
spot a deinterlacing artifact on a modern TV unless the footage is of a starfield or some other
worst case scenario. You will spot deinterlacing artifacts if the bitrate of the video is so low
that the mosquito noise dominates the vertical detail in the video. If this is true, your problem
is that you have been too stingy with the bitrate.

If you need web output from an interlaced frame, there are a number of nice deinterlacing plugins
but you need to spend $. Most of the web video I see is heavily compressed 1280x720 anyway
so whether you shoot 1080/60i or 720/60p the tiny differences are going to get smoothed away by
heavy compression.

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

It's nonsense to say that shooting at at 24/25/30fps progressive "simulates the judder that one gets from a cheap cell phone or iphone like camera". It just doesn't & as evidence all cinema movies & many TV shows are shot at 24fps (film or progressive video).

Cinema has traditionally run at 24 fps because the low light levels of the theater mean
the eye is seeing in the "scotopic" regime where the temporal acuity of the eye is lower.
The frame rate places some requirements on keeping the motion in the image down to avoid judder,
particularly with respect that the speed that one can pan. See a text on film technique for more.

Television in the US (apologies for my lack of knowledge about our overseas friends) was
60 fields per second between 1936 and about 2009. It was this higher frame rate because
television is much brighter than film and seen in uncontrolled high level room lighting.
In this circumstance the eye is closer to "photopic" vision and can perceive motion at much
higher than 30 frame per second rates.

In 2009 or so, content providers realized that there wasn't enough bandwidth on the direct broadcast
satellites and terrestrial DTV to cram as many parallel streams of advertising in as would be
nice. I watch the H264 encoded streams from a US DBS provider and I would agree that there
is not enough bandwidth to send interlaced footage. Six mbps is just not enough to send good
HD video unless you start cutting something. Thus, 30 fps became the acquisition standard because
there was just too much information in the high framerate video.

At any rate, we're talking about weddings which are somewhere between low motion talking
heads and an event/sports video. If you can shoot 30p and stay within the motion
requirements, by all means. If you have some high motion segments (say the bouquet
toss or the dance segments), make your own aesthetic judgement about the product you
want to sell. Do the tests, watch the footage online and on a TV.

You may even find that by shooting 30p you can cram an extra 30% more running time on
a single Bluray or DVD by using lower bitrates. This monetary benefit may also be compelling
to you. It certainly is to the folks that send us our advertising streams.

[Alen Koebel]

Originally Posted by Dustin Moore

Cinema has traditionally run at 24 fps because the low light levels of the theater mean the eye is seeing in the "scotopic" regime where the temporal acuity of the eye is lower.

I'm sure you meant to say "mesopic." And that would not be true all of the time, which nevertheless does not invalidate your point.