30p in final cut pro: is it worth it?

[Tom Brooks]

My bad. It’s 3:3. Each 20P frame makes 3 fields.

[Brian Findlay]

I always thought of 24P as being like a vinyl record, people are attached to 24p the same way they were attached to the warm sound of LPs, but that warm sound (and clicks and pops) were distortion. The difference of 24P to 30P (or F for you canon owners) is enough to give a fluidity that just isn’t there with 24p, you can pan faster, and fast action is just smoother. Yet people are attached to it for its flaws.
I personally see big differences with interlaced vs non interlaced and find progressive superior, even more so with fast action.

Okay.. you can start the flames now.

Brian

[Jeremy Garchow]

[yetanotherguy] “I personally see big differences with interlaced vs non interlaced and find progressive superior, even more so with fast action.”

I think you have pretty much summed up everyone’s point here, besides maybe, Tom’s

[Tom Brooks]

Jeremy,
I deserve a good-natured ribbing I’m sure. Come one, come all!

I have come a long way with this 30P thing. Your comments helped me to prove that you can indeed make a progressive 30P DVD. Apparently, others are skeptical of that. I figured if you were doing it on a regular basis it must work, but I had to take it all the way through the workflow to understand it myself. I regret putting people through any sort of tedium with me, but I thought my process, full of dead ends and red herrings, might be of interest in the greater scheme of things.

So, add to my findings: 30P DVD is as good as 24P DVD in terms of artifact-free progressive playback. Good stuff. After that, it’s a matter of preference and the various benefits of the timebase compatibility with 60P and 60i.

By the way, 30P should behave completely fine with 60P, no?
-Tom

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Tom Brooks] “I regret putting people through any sort of tedium with me, but I thought my process, full of dead ends and red herrings, might be of interest in the greater scheme of things. “

Tom, you did an outstanding job of actually putting the time in to discover what happens when people talk about different workflows and what makes things work in video land. There’s no better way to see what a difference of a few button clicks makes than by doing it yourself. I am not ribbing you, I commend you. I did not find any of your posts tedious in the least bit and it’s your type of learning and discovery that leads to better understanding of this whole process and the many many options we have today at our disposal. Some people get annoyed at all the different ways to do things, to me it makes it more fun.

As far as 30p and 60p being combined, that’s a whole other story and moves up to HD. 30p is half the progressive frames of 60p per second so in order to get 30p to play back in a 60p environment such as 720p30 over 60 that means that each progressive frame gets doubled to bring you up to 60p. It’ll look different than 60p material. 60p material looks like really smooth video (akin to 60i) and 720p30 will have more of that stroby look like all the tests you ran last week. Very similar to the difference between 30p and 60i expect that the amount of frames per second is doubled. There’s just a lot more information flying ’round.

Jeremy

[Herb Sevush]

Sean –

I see now, the magic is in “24 unique images per second”.

In this view inconsistencies in duration are irrelevant to the audience but the number of discreet images per second is not.

The fact that for 30 years film was shot and projected at various speeds centering around 18 fps and seemed to the public to have a “film look” doesn’t count for much I guess. And when sound came in and the frame rate ratcheted up to 24, which is a 33% increase, the fact that the audience didn’t seem to have a problem accepting this rate is, I gather, also beside the point. But now a 25% increase in rate to 30fps would be “un-magicall” to that same audience. What about 22 or 26 unique images per second – would they have that magic quality that 30 images per second obviously dosn’t? Or is 24 a divinely inspired magic number?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Jeremy Garchow]

60i comes from technical limitations of the gear at the time. Early television screens couldn’t physically draw the information fast enough. The phosphors of the screen couldn’t stay lit for a full second. Since US electricity runs @ 60hz (or cycles), the way around it was to draw each alternating line every 60th of a second (60hz) so that at least half the screen was lit at one time. 60i is not an arbitrary number.

I’d imagine that film running @ 18fps was probably due to the limitations of the gear/resources/technology of the time. People were SO amazed at looking at other people on screen, it didn’t matter, it could have been 10 frames a second and it still would have been amazing. Our culture is desensitized to this phenomenon. THen, as you said, sound being added was yet another technological advance to capture the imagination. How cool was it that now not only can you see moving images, you have the sound to go with it? Technically, 24fps was the best rate to do this and also isn’t an arbitrary number, it’s just the number that worked best with the gear/resources/technology of the time.

Jeremy

[Matt Campbell]

This has been one of the most informative posts I’ve ever read. You dudes know your stuff.

Working with a progressive display myself and pretty much only creating wed and DVD deliverables. When working in SD, I think I’ll switch to shooting 480i30p with our HVX 200 on both tape and P2.

So, just to recap, I’ll I do is capture the same way as 480i60i using DV NTSC Anamorphic but when it comes to editing, the difference would be to set the Field Dominance to NONE. Is that correct?

Shoot 480i30p
Capture DV NTSC Anamorphic
Edit using DV NTSC Anamorphic Easy Set Up, but change Field to NONE.

OS 10.6.3, Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 ghz quad-core intel xenon, 16 gb ram, with BM Intensity Pro card

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Matt Campbell] ” Is that correct? “

First of all, you deserve a medal for reading all of that, and second, a gold star as you passed the test. That is correct.

Jeremy

[Matt Campbell]

Yeah how bout it! Took damn near half the morning, along with looking at and testing stuff in FCP.

Now what if I have footage shot at 720p30PN. Should I simply downconvert to 480i30p (really 29.97 and not 30 fps, the reason I say that is because you have that option in the video tab in compressor). But wouldn’t that be a true progressive frame being shot at PN and not 720p30 which is over 59.94?

My interlaced days are numbered. Thank god!

OS 10.6.3, Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 ghz quad-core intel xenon, 16 gb ram, with BM Intensity Pro card