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shooting 50i or 25p?
I am starting a keying/roto/tracking/compositing job in a couple of weeks – to be shot on HDCAM and the post done in SD. I am trying to work out whether they are better off shooting 25p at 1080 or 50i at 1080?
They want a filmic look and I’ll be severely playing about with the footage in AE, so I wondered whether we’ll get a better result shooting interlaced and then combining fields in AE, or shooting straight to progressive?..The director seems to think you get a better result the first way..I’m not so sure..
Any thoughts from experience guys?
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7 Replies
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if the destination is progressive, i would shoot progressive. deinterlacing does involve some interpolation to generate the missing field data. even though it does use the data from the field that it is dropping, it is not going to be quite as good as having it shot progressive from the start. the progressive image should be a little sharper and cleaner than deinterlaced footage. also, compression is generally a little more kind to progressive frames that interlaced frames.
if your destination is going to be interlaced, then you may want to stay interlaced… deinterlace to process, but render that back out to interlaced.
the effects you mentioned will be better on progressive footage, but we’ve all used them on interlaced footage with fields separated and gotten good results, so i think it comes down to destination and asthetic preferences (some love the smoothness of interlacing, others the sharpness of progressive).
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Hi Moldy, cheers for the reply. The destination is UK broadcast on digibeta..I mainly do mograph work and this job is a bit of a new thing for me..I usually render my graphic work out progressive, just prefer the look. They want a filmic look for this and I just thought shooting progressive would give them better movement, as well as making life easier for me in AE, otherwise I’d either have to deinterlace the footage to do everything progressive and treat the footage to make it more filmic (I’m sure there would be image quality loss..?) or separate fields and render everything interlaced. (Not my fave option) The main issue being that I can’t see the interlaced result until I render my comp and view in Premiere..I want to be able to see *exactly* what it will look like in AE previews…why AE doesn’t have fielded previews stil baffles me!
I’m in a bit of a confused pickle!
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well if your looking to add to your arguement for progressive, you will also have a more natural (film-like) motion blur if you shoot progressive than you will if you deinterlace interlaced footage, which will look a bit choppy unless you effect it further with frmae blending, directional blur, reelsmart motion blur, etc…
so, better resolution, kinder compression artifacts and film-like motin blur… who can argue with that.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I’m totally with you guys…all stuff that I mentioned to the producer/director – the director reckons he’s done tests in the past with the camera we had in mind (Sony HDW-750P) and they got better results deinterlacing the 50i stuff in post than they did shooting progessive in the camera. I reckon that’s rubbish – I really can’t se how that’s possible. He was saying something like “taking the fields out in post gets better results than taking them out in camera”..If I’m not mistaken nothing gets ‘taken out’ in camera, it just doesn’t record to fields in the first place?
I know they will have been doing the tests on an Avid DS Nitris, probably with a load of fancy plugins and algorithms, but why go through all that hassle and render time just to end up with what you would have straight out of the camera in the first place?!? Surely, like you say it would be captured more naturally in camera anyway..
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Sorry Dave, what I meant, or what he said was “Combining the fields in post is better than the camera combining them as it would when shooting prog”…does that ring true, or is it total boll0x!?
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You don’t have to convince me Dave! But I’m only the graphic artist..the producer is going to listen to the director over me unless I can prove he’s talking balls. I can understand COMBINING the fields to make a progressive frame (tis like Andrew Kramer’s deinterlacing tute – you don’t lose any of the fields and so the resolution remains the same) but I still can’t see how you can get the same kind of natural motion blur that you would just shooting prog in the first place!?! This director (who’s actually pretty good on the whole – usually shoots 35mm, not HD I think) says that when they did the test (an automated pan on a motion control rig I presume – to compare shots) the progrss shot stuff was jerkier in it’s motion – this is his problem with it. Now I don’t know my way round a HDCAM camera, but our in house camera assistant and hire guy reckons there’s nothing wrong with prog.
Blimey, I’m just trying to save my producer time and money, whilst saving myself a bit of work aswell. Eee I don’t know..
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i think this just comes down to how the producer/director wants this to look in the end.
if they want it to look progressive in the end, then they should shoot prgressive, the image quality, motion blur and overall look will be noticably better than to de-interlace in post.
if they want it to look smoother, like video, then they should shoot it interlaced and keep it that way throughout. it forces you to deal with removing fields and putting them back in, but that’s not usually too bad of a workflow.
but to go out of their way shoot interlaced just to convert it to progressive in the end is just silly. (unless they wanted to slow-mo the footage, which actually can produce pretty good results)
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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