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System requirements fo 50p editing on iMac?
Please don’t laugh if this is a stupid question – I’m very much a novice! I’m trying to decide what camcorder to buy (between the Canon Legria HF G10 and Panasonic HC-X900M). One of the things it seems to be coming down to is that the Panny can record 1080/50p but the Canon only at 1080/50i or 1080/25p.
Now I suspect my iMac is not going to be able to cope with 50p, but having scoured the net don’t seem to find anything on the realistic system requirements needed for editing 50p in FCP X? I have only a modest iMac – mid 2011 model, 2.7GHz i5, AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB graphics card and 12gb of RAM. Up to now I’ve been editing 50i or 30p which works fine for my needs., but would seem sensible to leave my options open to 50p if I can.
Does anyone think it’s worth me giving myself the 50p option? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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12 Replies
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A friend of mine shot his documentary with an older JVC HDV camera (one of the GY-HD101 or so series, the small shoulder-models with interchangeable lenses), and shot in 50 progressive frames a second, and edited without problem on FCP 7 on an iMac that was from 2007 or so. So I think you shouldn’t worry too much.
It’s maybe different with an H.264 codec though, and I don’t know if FCP X supports 50p editing at this point.
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Where are you going to show the final product?
1080 50p is overkill for most purposes and in most cases, will require conversion or highly specialized gear for baseband playback.
1080p25 will be much more friendly and easier to deal with.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “1080 50p is overkill for most purposes”
I guess some people like the “Hobbit” look when it comes to temporal resolution and narrative. 😉
If one is shooting fast action sports 50p may have value. One could shoot 720 but even these days YouTube does handle 1080.
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[Craig Seeman] “I guess some people like the “Hobbit” look when it comes to temporal resolution and narrative. ;-)”
Ha!
To me it’s not so much about look, but about handing 1080p50 in post .
1080 50p will need to be converted to 50i for 1080 broadcast, BlueRay or SD DVD.
If that’s the case, why shoot 1080 50p to begin with?
If cross converting to 720p, I guess an argument could be made if you are sure you have a 720p master.
In order to monitor in true 50p, you’ll need 3G hdsdi or hdmi 1.4a and an appropriate monitor to handle either of those signals.
You can shoot 1080 50p if you want, just know the consequences!
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Thanks guys. So sounds like I’ve probably got the capacity to edit 50p if I wanted to, but doesn’t sound like there’s much point right now. I only really edit stuff for my own benefit outputting to apple tv, dvd or maybe blu ray soon. I guess 50p might be useful if I specifically want to capture something for a slow mo, but that’s about it.
I have to say it’s really hard trying to pick this side of things. I’ve got got a couple of FCP X books, but they gloss over generic basics like frame rates etc (any reading suggestions gratefully received!). Up to this point the quality of output I ultimately get has been very much down to luck!
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[Jeremy Garchow] “1080 50p will need to be converted to 50i for 1080 broadcast, BlueRay or SD DVD.
If that’s the case, why shoot 1080 50p to begin with? “
1080p50 converts to 1080i50(25) very easily. There’s no loss of temporal motion since one still has 50 discreet moving images. Of course you could just shoot 50i to begin with.
Shooting 25p and converting to 50i would mean there’d be no change in motion between filed 1 and field 2. Of course if you want a progressive look this would be the way to go.
If temporal motion were paramount I can see shooting 50p and using that where progressive works (sports for web maybe) and easily convert to 50i for broadcast and Blu-ray.
Imagine having a sports advertiser who needs, broadcast spots, in theater advertising, digital signage, web, coming from the same source.
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I hear you, but it seems silly to me to shoot p when you’re going for an interlaced feel and then converting to interlace.
Shooting 1080p50 for 50% slowdown, yes, but for regular tv? Not sure if shooting at double frame rate will yield any measurable difference in end quality for OP.
For this day and age, I’d shoot 25p.
Once we can shoot 150p (3x- or 180p for us NTSC-ers) then we can talk as you could make p or i material for any deliverable and have it all achieve the appropriate look you are going for (interlaced or progressive). At that point it becomes an actual workflow device.
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I edited my previous post to reflect a perceived mastery in proper mathematics and spelling of the written English word.
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I would think you just drop it in the 50i(25) timeline and FCP would interlace it perfectly just as it does 60p in a 60i(29.97) timeline. I wouldn’t think any special conversion would be neccessary. So, it really would give the best of all worlds, but is kinda overkill and a resource hog for sure. Especially since you can’t play it anywhere at 50p. Maybe YouTube? Do they support that? At that point you’d be at the mercy of Joe Schmo’s computer processor/graphics card for playback, not to mention their connection speed for double the data/frame rate.
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50p > 50i > YouTube which would probably end up as some sort of mushy 25p.
Why not just shoot 25p and keep the fidelity? I just don’t see the point of touching interlace anymore.
I’m all for pushing the envelope, but there’s also better and worse ways to get a particular job done.
But, what do I know? It’s a brand new frontier.
Godspeed.
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