1080 60p renders: Blu-ray players et al. they can handle the format

[Danny Hays]

A fast computer,I have two i7s and both can playback the 1080p60 .mts files from my tm700 smoothly in media player and edit them in Vegas to 1080p60 mp4 or .wmv files. You need to make custom project and render presets to work with the 60 fps. depending on the bitrate you use will deterine what computers will play them back at 60p. 1080p60 ins’t a supported bluray format but some have found some players that play them. What kind of camera are you using?

[Carl Alessi]

Thanks for the reply, Danny…

Actually, I have a TM700 as well. But my question doesn’t pertain to playback of the original .m2ts files (I’m also using an i7), but rather the playback of an edited, rendered format that can be played through my widescreen TV. I’m aware that the current blu-ray specs do not support 1080 60p, but I’m wondering if there are blu-ray players that will support edited content by way of an SD card (I know several players now support SD Card playback of the camera’s original content, but again, I’m looking to play back edited content).

For example: can I render the content out of Vegas with a custom template to, say, mpeg2, then copy the files to an SD card and play them back via a blu-ray player currently on the market?

Carl

[John Rofrano]

[Carl Alessi] “but rather the playback of an edited, rendered format that can be played through my widescreen TV. “

NTSC TV’s expect 29.97fps. PAL TV’s expect 25 fps. That’s all they can play so any player that would accept your 60p footage will silently convert it to 29.97 in order to play it back on a TV. Even DVD’s that contain 24p footage will silently add pull-down and convert them to 29.97 fps. So the answer is no, there is no such device.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

“A PC” is currently the only go-to device for this, really. Most newer Blu-ray players will output 1080/60p, including the PS3, but that’s usually an up-conversion — they won’t necessarily play it. Definitely a non-standard among consumer formats. Almost (see below).

You don’t really need a high-end PC to play 1080/60p, IF you have a decent GPU and use a GPU-accelerated player. I can do this on my laptop, which is a Core2 at 2.4GHz plus a nVidia 8600M GPU. Not too difficult to build a livingroom PC with specs to handle 1080/60p.

If you have a player than will support the 1080/60p @ 28Mb/s originals, why not author back to the same format. You’d have to render in AVC, and maybe format it in an AVCHD file system to get that player to work… but it doesn’t know it’s playing edited video, as long as it’s the right format.

Some players will play other formats, like .MP4 or .MOV encapsulation rather than AVCHD (which is that original MPEG-2 transport stream file, AVC video, AC-3 audio), but not automatically. On the PS3, you have to explicitly browse and launch the file. The PS3 had problems with 1080/60p AVC when last I tried it, don’t know if this has been fixed.

The one actual real consumer format with 1080/60p support is AVCHD 2.0. I don’t know if this is explicitly supported in any Blu-ray player yet, but they did add that to the AVCHD standard (up to 28Mb/s, just as the TM700 does it). And that’s only a guarantee the player can play it, not that it’ll understand a non-AVCHD disc or flash card, much less some other video format (I’d stick with AVC when experimenting, at least to start with).

-Dave

[Carl Alessi]

Thanks everyone…this explains why I was having so much trouble locating information about playback at 60p. I was asking the wrong question, not realizing the basic truth that even new 1080p flatscreens are still constrained by the NTSC 29.97 fps standard.

I guess I’ll have to go back to the decision of rendering footage from my TM700 to either 720 30p, or 1080 60i.

-Carl

[Danny Hays]

[NTSC TV’s expect 29.97fps. PAL TV’s expect 25 fps. That’s all they can play] John, your not saying 1080p HDTVs can’t play 1080p60 are you? If I render a 1080 30p video and a 1080 60p and play them back to back, With some fast moving video, I can clearly see it stepping through each frame with the 30p but with the 60p I can’t. If you know someone with a TM700, connect it to a 1080 60p HDTV and you will clearly see the smoothness compaired to 30p.
You can use a TM700 as a playback device for your edited video if you use the HDWriter software to edit and render back to .m2ts and put back on a flash card. I haven’t found a way to use Vegas to edit and get a TM700 to play it back. There is no way to render to .mts or .m2ts with audio that I can find.
I think the difference is just the header between .mts (Taken from the flash card of a TM700 or .m2ts (Retrieved with the included software HDWriter. Either way the file size is exactly the same.

[John Rofrano]

[Danny Hays] “John, your not saying 1080p HDTVs can’t play 1080p60 are you?”

Perhaps some of the newer ones can and if you connect your TV via DVI it can of course playback at any frame rate because it’s essentially a computer monitor at that point. I guess connecting the camera directly falls into that category. But all of the broadcast devices (DVD players, Blu-ray players, Media Players) will convert to 29.97fps for NTSC compatibility.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Carl Alessi]

John,

“TV via DVI it can of course playback at any frame rate because it’s essentially a computer monitor at that point. I guess connecting the camera directly falls into that category.”

I don’t think connecting the TM700 camera directly to the TV would support a higher frame rate, given that it uses an HDMI 1.2 cable.

-Carl

[Dave Haynie]

Modern displays are “inspired by” than “constrained by” the NTSC standard. NTSC, of course, supported only 480/60i video. Pretty much any modern display (ATSC compatible) will support inputs at 480/60p (some monitors don’t support 480/60i, some do), 1080/60i, and 720/60p… and by “60p”, of course, I really mean 59.94fps.

And that’s not all. Most recently televisions, as well as computer monitors, support 1080/60p input just dandy. Some also support 1080/24p (where, again, 24p is really 23.976fps).

When you’re connecting via HDMI, your monitor and your video device handshake, and agree on a good resolution to use. For example, my PS3 and my 5-year-old Samsung DLP always “speak” at 1080/60p, which is essentially the native resolution of the Samsung (it upconverts any input to 1080/60p). So that’s pretty much what you want, most of the time.

However, a more advanced monitor might handle 72fps display rates, even though the connection (via HDMI) doesn’t support 1080/72p. In this case, it would be better to deliver film video at the native 1080/24p, and let the display do the up-conversion, rather than the player.

-Dave

[Carl Alessi]

This subject has gotten more interesting than I thought it would be when I opened the thread. Let’s see if I can summarize what I’ve learned so far:

• NTSC is limited to approximately 30 fps.
• ATSC does not inherently have such a limitation. Neither does HDMI 1.2. It depends upon the monitor.

All of this causes me to circle back to my original question: for those of us with a Panasonic TM700 camera who want to edit its 1080 60p content in Sony Vegas, what is:

• The best format and resolution to render to, depending upon…
• The device (possibly a blu-ray player by way of a mounted SD Card) that you would play that content from.

Any takers on the last two points?

–Carl