Simple video question –

[John Rofrano]

[Bob Moyer] “The question is which of the two formats mentioned above should I use?”

You realize, of course, that there are no “Simple Video Questions” 😉

The answer is… it depends. For normal capturing of the world around you 1080i is fine and it’s supported by Blu-ray so it’s going to be the easiest to work with. If, however, you are shooting fast moving objects like sports action, I would switch to 1080p. The reason is that you may want to post some of your videos on the web or use a media server in which case you’re going to want to make them progressive and fast moving objects combined with interlacing doesn’t mix very well so it’s best to shoot those progressive to start with.

Now I know some are going to say always shoot 1080p and that’s OK too, but Blu-ray doesn’t support 1080-30p so you will be rendering your video to 1080-60i anyway. The difference is that 30p looks less like 60i video and more like 24p film so some people actually prefer shooting 30p although you need to make your pans more slow and deliberate so that they aren’t choppy because you are only sampling at 30 times per second instead of 60 time per second unless your camera shoots 60p which is a whole other can of worms entirely.

… see I told you it wasn’t so simple.

~jr

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

[Bob Moyer]

John,

Thank you for reply. For the most part, I will be just capturing the everyday world around me (so 1080i). However, my grandsons are heavily involved in soccer (so 1080p). What do I do if I want to combine them both in the same video? I know I initially said a “simple” question, perhaps I should now change it to a “dumb” question. Thanks again for your time and help.

Your second paragraph totally lost me. As I mentioned, I am an amateur/hobbist and will I ever need 1080-30p or 24p? I am not trying to be smart but just curious.

Bob

[John Rofrano]

[Bob Moyer] “What do I do if I want to combine them both in the same video?”

They should mix find. Vegas Pro and Movie Studio are very good at handling projects with multiple formats. I would let that worry you.

[Bob Moyer] ” I know I initially said a “simple” question, perhaps I should now change it to a “dumb” question. Thanks again for your time and help.”

There are no dumb questions. The dumbest thing you can do is not to ask! 😉

[Bob Moyer] “Your second paragraph totally lost me. As I mentioned, I am an amateur/hobbist and will I ever need 1080-30p or 24p? I am not trying to be smart but just curious.”

OK, let me put it another way because this is important for you to understand. 1080p tells me nothing about the frame rate of the camera. Does the camera shoot 1080p at 30 fps or 1080p at 60 fps? Here is why it’s important:

At 60i you are sampling the world 60 times a second. At 60p you are sampling the world 60 times a second. But at 30p you are only sampling the world 30 times a second. If you pan your camera cross a room at a constant speed at 60i you may get smooth fluid movement. If you pan your camera cross the same room at the same constant speed at 30p you may get jerky movement that is disturbing to watch. You will have to slow down your pan movement by 1/2 to get the same fluid motion at 30p as you did at 60i because your camera is sampling the world only 1/2 as much. It’s all about the frame rate.

Put another way, 60i is very forgiving to camera movement and 30p is only 1/2 as forgiving so you may need to learn to move your camera more slowly to make the motion just as fluid if you shoot 30p.

Does that make sense? It’s OK if it doesn’t. You can do some shooting tests when you get the camera and see what I mean.

Of course if your new camera shoots 1080-60p then you don’t have to worry about camera movement so much. You asked what the difference between 1080i and 1080p is and I can’t answer that fully without know the frame rate of your 1080p camera. So I just wanted to make you aware that you shooting style may have to change between shooting 60i and 30p. But if your camera shoots 60p then you can ignore everything I just said… but you didn’t say what the frame rate of the camera is in progressive mode so I still don’t know.

~jr

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

[Bob Moyer]

John,

The camera that I am ‘expecting’ is the Panasonic X900M. I know from reading its specifications that it offers a variety of capturing options but I guess I will just have to wait until I can get my hands on the actual product and play with it a little before I can truly understand all of the information that you have graciously furnished. Thank you and I am sure I will be back seeking more guidance after the holidays.

Bob

[John Rofrano]

[Bob Moyer] “The camera that I am ‘expecting’ is the Panasonic X900M.”

OK, that shoots 60p so you won’t have to worry about changing your shooting style when using progressive mode. Your problem will then be that you can’t deliver 60p to either Blu-ray or DVD so you’ll need to make sure that you disable resample on all of your events before rendering for Blu-ray or DVD so that you don’t get any ghosting from blended frames.

Your other option is to just shoot 60i and not have all these problems. 😉

~jr

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

[Mark Barton]

I have a similar camcorder, Panasonic TM900, shooting at 1080p 60fps. I notice that people recommend disabling the resampling, but I am unclear when I should do that.

Is it based on going from a 1080p to 1080i (i.e. 60p to 60i)or would I also disable resampling going from 1080x60p to 1080x24p?

[Graham Bernard]

John, your replies should be made ESSENTIAL reading at the top of ANY Video forum.

Somebody should really produce a “flow-diag” of the vagaries of Capture>>through to Delivery/Publication. And here, Publication means the Internet too.

Great replies John.

Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
PC 7 64-bit 16gb * Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz * 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti
Cameras: Canon XF300 and two elderly XM2s

[Nigel O’neill]

[Graham Bernard] “John, your replies should be made ESSENTIAL reading at the top of ANY Video forum.”

Both him and Dave Haynie 🙂

[John Rofrano]

[Mark Barton] “Is it based on going from a 1080p to 1080i (i.e. 60p to 60i)or would I also disable resampling going from 1080x60p to 1080x24p?”

Definitely when going from 60p to 60i. The reason is that Vegas “Smart Resample” isn’t very smart unfortunately. If it were, it would see that 30 fps is 1/2 of 60 fps and simply drop every other frame but it doesn’t. It tries to blend 60 frames into 30 frames and that causes ghosting in the images as it superimposes two frames on top of each other. This is when you have to tell Vegas to not resample the video.

Going from 60p to 24p is a different story. If you just tell Vegas to drop frames your motion may get jerky and you may want to keep resample on to blend the frames and make the motion smoother. I would not go from 60p straight to 24p because again, Vegas will try and blend all 60 frames down to 24 and you will never get a full frame that isn’t blended. I would go from 60p to 30p with resample off, then from 30p to 24p with resample on. This will make sure that every 4th frame is a whole frame from the original footage with the next 3 frames being blended (3/4, 1/2 1/4) to make up for the time difference.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Thanks Grazie, maybe it’s worth a tutorial. I’ll see what I can do.

~jr

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