No 25P in DVDA blu ray for us in PAL Land?
 

I've just started looking at Blu Ray options in DVDA 5 and have noticed that there is no 25P option in the drop-down for framerate. It's a bit of an omission. How do others get it to play with 25P footage? it has 24P - why not 25P? Why only 25i, when all Blu Ray (IB) will be played on progressive, digital displays?!?

Is there a method for forcing 25P in DVDA?

There is no 25p in the BluRay specification. So it's not an omission, it's adhering to the international standard.

Hmmm...
 

So isn't that going to mean all the 25P footage shot in PAL land taking a hit when it's converted to 24P?

All Hollywood movies are converted from 24p to 25p for PAL land. How do they look to you?

In fact, Blu-Ray output to "50Hz" (or any multiple thereof) displays is interlaced only (50/25i). Thus, 25p content had to be authored and mastered onto Blu-Ray using PSF ("Progressive Segmented Frame").

As are all non-Hollywood movies. Or should I say films.

I for one am very glad to see that Blu-ray supports 24p. I just wish all video cameras would shoot in straight 24p instead of the puzzling 24000/1001 and would drop the dreaded PAL vs. NTSC incompatibilities. Not only would it make the videos at the same rate as film, it would also make it fully compatible with the sound sampled at 48 or 96 kHz, both of each are simple multiples of 24. There would be an exact integer number of sound samples per video frame.

I figured they must have had a good historical reason for non-integer frame rates in analog TV, but in digital?

Jerky but that's something that's always been unavoidable due to the original PAL system being tied to the fact that the electricity supply is at 50Hz as opposed to North America's 60Hz (and NTSC's 60Hz refresh rate).

That's all very well for films, as we're stuck with that but for HDTV material shot in PAL countries with cameras shooting in 25/50P and a 50Hz electricity supply it's better to have the native framerate than having to convert it/slow it down.

Agreed. So why not buy an Arri or a RED. Or a Varicam. There are numerous ways to get true 25p. If that is a requirement, then it seems that you'd be hunting a camera that does it.

That was true in analog days. The frame rate of digital video has nothing to do with either the 50 or the 60 Hz of AC electricity. All digital processing is done with direct current and the timing of the frame rate is measured by digital clocks which are typically controlled by oscillators, such as the quartz crystal.

I think you misunderstood - I already have the 25P camera (as I am in PAL Land), the problem is that Blu Ray doesn't currently do it - which means having to slow it down by converting it to 24P and suffering the consequences of not being able to watch (eg) BBC HD in native form and having to put up with the stutter caused by watching 24P on 50Hz equipment.

So why are the HD cameras Sony and others sell in Europe and other PAL countries 25P/50i HD?

Because in this transitional period TV continues airing at PAL speeds in Europe and NTSC speeds in North America to accommodate the people who still have an analog receiver and convert the digital TV signal to analog.

The differences between NTSC in North America and PAL/SECAM in Europe back in the fifties and sixties did not matter much. But nowadays with a vivid cultural interchange and with the transition to pure digital, it is time we scrapped the differences between film and video and between Europe and America (and Japan), and the rest of the world, too.

Personally, I always shoot and edit at 24p regardless of whether I am in Europe (I am originally from Slovakia and travel there as often as I can afford) or in the US, where I live. When delivering on a DVD, I let Sony Vegas handle the necessary transcoding. I have not put anything on Blu-ray yet, but when the time comes, I will stay with 24p.

This only works if your camera shoots natively in 24p. Vegas alone cannot perform an IVTC if that "24p" video is actually encapsulated in a 60i stream unless the 60i stream is already in the standard-definition DV-AVI form with 2-3-3-2 pulldown inserted (2-3 pulldown removal is supported by Vegas only with this SD DV-AVI material). And when rendering 24p content to a format that's compatible with SD DVD, it is important to insert the 2-3 pulldown since standard-definition DVD players do not recognize anything that's not interlaced (your DVD authoring software, such as DVD Architect, will automatically encode 24p inside a 60i stream if such a 2-3 pulldown is inserted). Authoring 24p content directly onto standard-definition DVD without the insertion of the required 2-3 pulldown will result in a non-DVD-compliant video which will require recompression and reconversion, which will degrade image quality even more than just a simple downconversion to SD would have done. And the fact that standard-definition DVD is a legacy of the NTSC/PAL standards (they support only interlaced video encoding) means that DVDs intended for one television system will not play back properly, if at all, on a DVD player intended for the other television system. Hence the popularity of "region-free" DVD players.

If on the other hand you shoot in the encapsulated 24p mode, there is nothing you can do about it short of acquiring extra software which can correctly perform the IVTC function. This is because Vegas will detect that video as an NTSC 60i video. And Vegas by itself (as well as most other NLEs without the proper plugins) does a very poor job of downsizing interlaced HD video content.

this was the first thing i brought up
 

on DVD5, what the stupid thing is the prior version 4 had it, if the blue ray standard doesn't cover 25p, then the people who make the standard need to get their act together and add it, I mean common, must be about 30% of the world uses it, why the heck would one omit it. Anyway enough of my blabbing.
Sony could of at least kept the 25p option it already had in the SD options at least, but Sony as we know have a habbit of not making sense with their decisions, nor responding to their client base needs.
And now I'll take a breath and go on my merry way!

Well, mine does. :)

The situation with Blu Ray and 25p is the same as with DVD and 25p. If you shoot and edit 25p properly, the 25p cadence will be preserved even though the file on the disc is 50i.

Richard

OK heres one, how do you get the 25p cadance from 50i footage? If I render out as interlaced then the prepared blu-ray has that interlaced look. But I can go down to 24p and it looks nice but the workflow is a pig.

Seems to me they've not thought it through properly and have totally disregarded all the areas in the world that shoot 25P as a matter of course (the legacy of PAL systems) for video - they only seem to be thinking about film.

Well... the BluRay Disc Assocation has the following Board of Directors:

# Apple Inc.
# Dell Inc.
# Hewlett-Packard
# Hitachi, Ltd.
# Intel Corporation
# LG Electronics
# Mitsubishi Electric
# Panasonic Corporation
# Pioneer Corporation
# Royal Philips Electronics
# Samsung Electronics
# Sharp Corporation
# Sony Corporation
# Sun Microsystems
# TDK Corporation
# Thomson SA
# 20th Century Fox
# Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group
# Warner Bros. Entertainmen


Which one of these do you think was unfamiliar with the areas of the world that use 25p? And which do you feel might not have "thought through" what you have?

I'd be willing to bet my yearly salary that 25p was well discussed prior to ratification of the standards being released, and since the profits from 25p countries could equate to billions of dollars of revenue, I am quite sure it was "thought through". The conclusions they reached may not mesh with yours though, which is understandable.

As to them thinking only of film, it would seem to me that a great proportion of these BOD are not directly involved in the film industry, so I highly doubt that is true.

So you would think from that, Sony at least would 24P on the camera as well as 25P if you can't use 25P on HD discs. Duh!