PN or PA for possible film out?

[Barry Green]

1080/24pA looks better than 720/24pN. More resolution, more detail, less compression.

It’ll look basically identical when you put it to DVD, but on a larger screen the 1080 will hold an edge over the 720. Not night and day, but about 20% better.

Problems? Depends on your editing system; if you’re using Avid, you can’t edit 1080/24PA footage *as* 24p; Avid makes you edit it as 60i. So if using Avid, I’d say forget the 1080 mode and just go 720 and make your life easier.

But if using Vegas or Premiere with Raylight, or EDIUS, or FCP, all of them have the ability to strip out 1080/24pA pulldown and give you a pure raw 24p data file. In those cases, 1080/24pA is just plain better than 720/24pN.

The other situation you’ll run into is data size and card recording time. 720/24pN will give you 2.5x as much footage, per gigabyte, as 1080/24pA will. So you’ll have to decide if the clarity and cleaner compression of 1080/24pA is worth having it take up 2.5x as much storage space.

[Peter Sassi]

Barry,

Thanks! I know it’s a trade off between disk space and that 20% or so you talked about in res. What about the P versus the PA in the cadence if we “Do decide to go film out?” If i read you correctly, the PA will be okay to edit in a 720 24p timeline (FCP) and go to NTSC with out any artifacts or exaggerated “flicker”?

Also, with a Firestore (not decided on yet) what is the advantage in shooting P2 versus QT other than the meta-data. What about disk space between P2 and QT?

Thanks,

Peter Sassi

[Barry Green]

[Peter Sassi] “What about the P versus the PA in the cadence if we “Do decide to go film out?” If i read you correctly, the PA will be okay to edit in a 720 24p timeline (FCP) and go to NTSC with out any artifacts or exaggerated “flicker”?”

Some misconceptions here, so let’s start back a ways. 24P vs 24PA *only* applies to 1080. 720 is a whole different kettle of fish. 🙂

As for the cadence: if you edit 1080/24pA footage on FCP in a 1080/24p sequence, there is no cadence. The pulldown disappears and you edit the pure raw original 24 frames per second. It’s exactly what you’d want. When outputting to NTSC, you’d have to downconvert and then it would put pulldown back in (unless you’re going to DVD, in which case no pulldown is necessary; DVD players were designed from the beginning to work with 24fps footage).

With 1080/24p (instead of 1080/24pA) things are not so rosy — you’ll have 3:2 pulldown and yes you’ll have cadence issues and overall I just say “don’t do it”. 1080/24P mode is for when you’re not editing the footage, or when you’re handing the footage off to someone else and don’t know how they’re editing it, or if they’re editing on an Avid. For any other rational purpose, ditch the 1080/24P mode and use 1080/24pA instead.

For 720, you have a choice of 720/24P or 720/24pN. When shooting to the P2 cards, there are overwhelming benefits (both in shooting and in editing) to using 720/24pN mode. If you intend to edit on a 24p timeline, you’ll make your life easier and your editor’s life easier by sticking with 24pN whenever possible.

[Peter Sassi]

Barry,

Thanks again. It looks like 24pn it is. What about P2 vrsus native QT 24pn when using the firestore? I truly appreicate your knowledge of where the “potholes” are 😉

Peter Sassi

[Barry Green]

Well, I wouldn’t use the FireStore if I could avoid it, so you’re kind of on your own with that one. 🙂

But as far as that goes, it depends on your editing platform. The QT format on the FS-100 is only going to work with FCP; if you intend to make your project cross-platform or to edit on a Windows system, you’d definitely choose MXF.

[Peter Sassi]

Barry,

I know the FS has kind of a bad rap. I recently took it to Alaska. We were 300 miles north of Anchorage then flew by Cessna another 200 miles to near the Yukon border. I took the thing on horseback, hiked with it on my back, and it never missed a beat. I guess having my first “yet” on the set would be a very bad thing though. I had a couple of the small 160G Webbie Tech buss powered FW drives for backup till i got back to AC, and darn, the 720P played back off them pretty well (5400 RPM’s!

On this, our first feature, the DP has 4 – 16G cards and I have one and two 8’s, so i think that should hold us. As far as cross platform, i haven’t been on an Avid in a while and got a call from a friend with a new Mac Adrenaline and he was having a heck of a time getting the P2 files ingested. I pointed him to this forum.

I have P2 Log which i use less and less on my G4 laptop. The import to QT for FCP in P2 Log is quite slow compared to FCP. Why would I want to try Raylight? I just came across it and it seems popular.

Thanks very much for your time, (BTW, i did buy your DVX100 Book and it was/is great) I appreciate your willingness to share.

Peter Sassi

[Barry Green]

[Peter Sassi] “The import to QT for FCP in P2 Log is quite slow compared to FCP. Why would I want to try Raylight?”

Why would you want to try Raylight? Because it’s like a magic wand that makes all the FCP/P2 bugs and limitations just disappear. All the complaints we hear here about FCP won’t import this or it won’t import that, blah blah — Raylight makes that all stop.

But it’s infinitely better than that, because you talked about import speed and how FCP’s importing is faster than P2 Log. Well, how would you like instantaneous importing? Let’s say you go out and work in the field shooting this feature for the next few weeks… when you come back to the edit station, instead of ingesting all that footage, how about just editing your picture? Raylight does away with the whole import/ingest process and gives you immediate access to your footage, whether it’s on a hard disk or on a P2 card or whatever. Probably my most highly-recommended tool for Mac users who want to work with P2 footage.

[Peter Sassi]

Barry,

I’ll d/l the Raylight demo asap. Thanks again for all your help.

Peter Sassi