[John Sprung]

Your picture consists of a large number of frames. Each frame is a still picture covering a small interval of time. You can display those frames at 24 per second or at 25 per second, and the show will look pretty much the same to everybody. It’ll just run a bit longer or shorter. There are some very rare individuals who can see the difference, but so far I’ve only met one.

Trying to mess with the content of the frames to make new frames for a different rate is an extremely difficult problem, and a major mistake for converting between 24 and 25. If you had to convert between, say, 24 and 30, you’d have to try it. But for this, don’t. The artifacts are always obvious.

Let your frames be what they are, and stretch or squish the sound to fit. Today, sound can be pitch shifted with excellent results.

We’ve always made major network TV shows at 24 fps, either on film, tape, or digital cameras. We sell these shows in the PAL/SECAM markets by speeding them up, but leaving all the frames exactly as they are. (They get a couple minutes more commercial inventory per hour that way.)

— J.S.

[John Sprung]

Actually, he is all in one format, 720p/24. That’s a good place to be. The best way to go is to finish in 720p, then downconvert with 3-2 to NTSC, and frame for frame 4% fast for PAL. 720p is nicely oversampled relative to both SD formats, so they’ll both look better than native NTSC or PAL shooting.

— J.S.

[John Sprung]

There are two issues here that affect smoothness of motion: 3-2 pulldown, and shutter angle.

Given that you see the same smoothness both in film theaters and from DVD, we can eliminate a sensitivity to 3-2. People who grew up in the PAL/SECAM countries tend to be the ones who are bothered by 3-2. We from the NTSC world get used to it. 3-2 gives 50% more time to every other frame, resulting in a 12 cycle per second vibration added to the motion.

Shutter angle determines how much motion blur there is. Film cameras are traditionally used with angles near 180 degrees, not because that’s the best choice, but rather because it takes about half the frame period to mechanically pull down the film and register it accurately. Using significantly smaller angles results in sharper frames, because there’s much less motion blur. Objects don’t move as far in the brief time that the shutter is open. But that’s counterproductive to the illusion of motion. It gives you a really fast slide show instead of movies. The smaller the shutter angle, the slower the point at which moving objects break the illusion and start to skip.

It sounds like you’ve been seeing video shot with small shutter angles. With digital cameras, we now have the opportunity to go the other way, to angles much larger than 180, even to within a hair of a full 360. Surprise, the wagon wheels blur out instead of going backwards if you shoot with a 359 degree shutter.

— J.S.

[John Sprung]

Given the same size chips (say 2/3″), dividing the surface up into 720 rather than 1080 would make each photosite bigger. So, you should be collecting more photons per location, which would make the 720 faster rather than slower. It should go by area, which would make it about a stop. 720 is just under 1 meg, 1080 just over 2 megs.

— J.S.

[John Sprung]

Changing to squeeze or letterbox would result in the rest of the material not matching for resolution with what’s in the can. So, stay with flat 4:3, but bear in mind that you may want to do a tilt-and-scan later to make 16:9.

— J.S.

[John Sprung]

I shot aboard a WWII Bato/Galato class once, USS Roncador, SS-301.

You need a crew that can pretty much forget about traditional job descriptions and everybody does everything. For instance, the boom guy tweaks the barn doors on a light, because it’s much quicker to have it done by the person who’s nearest than to get him and others out of the way so an electrician can get in there. People don’t go get things, they pass a sandbag along to where it’s needed.

Lights will hang on clamps of various kinds rather than stands, you’ll want flex arms instead of C-stands, and all the smaller control stuff that goes with them.

— J.S.

[John Sprung]

The major TV networks have no problem at all with progressive origination downconverted to 60i. The vast majority of the prime time schedule is shot either on 24p digital cameras or on film at 24 fps. Working in 30p is much less common because the foreign markets prefer to get 24 and run it 4% fast at 25Hz. In our workflow, everything is 1080p/24 throughout. We archive 1080p/24. Downconversion to 60i happens in the delivery dub run.

— J.S.