So, the dvd player converts the 24p stuff to 30p? Am I right? What tvs can show 30p material?

TV's show only interlaced. DVD players convert to that. Try using a DVD ripper program on a segment of one of your DVD's. When you bring it into Vegas you'll notice that about every 4th frame is duplicated. That's the 24fps to 30 (29.97)fps conversion. You'll also see this on movies that play on TV. if you record them to your computer/DV tape, and do frame by frame, you'll see the extra frame.

cool, eh? :)

Virtually all movies are shot on 35mm film at a rate of 24 frames per second. A "telecine" machine converts the final film movie into video, and that's what you watch on TV.

The creators of the DVD standard back in the early 1990's figured it would be more efficient to store movies on DVD in the 24 frame format, rather than the converted "30 interlaced frames/sec" because if the frame rate was slower then the MPEG2 encoder could deliver the 480x720 images with better quality for a given bitrate. They gave the DVD player the job of converting the format back to the TV standard.

There is an artifact created when going to 30 frames interlaced. It is called "judder" and it's pretty obvious once someone points it out. The PAL gang gets a better picture, since all the DVD player has to do to suit PAL is to slightly increase the playing speed from 24 to 25 frames per second.

all new panasonic HD plasma's can play 24p at 24fps ..
sony has a few HD plasma's that can at 24fps and will include it on new HD plasma models as they are introduced.

a few sony's HD TV's can do a reverse 3:2 pull down from source material to play 24fps ..

many digital projector's can play 24fps.. many hi end DVD players can remove the 3:2 if source was 24p and on DVD at 29.97..

Now if enough people made enough money to buy the nice HDTV's. :) we'd be all set as video guys and never have to deal with interlaced tv again!

To answer the original question for musman, the point really is that you can fit more video onto the DVD. Encoding duplicated frames or whatever doesn't improve the quality, just chews up space on the DVD.

So rendering / encoding to 24p and letting the player do some hard work gets you more video on the DVD or lets you use a higher bitrate which will improve the quality.

I'm missing something here.

One of the reasons for shooting 24P is to get closer to that "filmlike" look with video. If you shoot 24P and convert eventually to 30i that advantage should disappear I would think. But that doesn't happen for some reason since they are using 24P to shoot much of the current TV series and it does look different.

Can someone explain this?

InterceptPoint, there is a lot more to "filmlike" than 24 vs. 30 and Progressive vs. Interlaced. Those are probably some of the smallest factors.

What is much more important is proper lighting, good direction, good cinematography, good lenses, good cameras, proper exposure and whitebalance, and knowning how to use all the above. A $400 camcorder recording in 24P at home is going to look a lot less filmlike than a professional camera recording at 30i in a studio.

If there really is an important difference between film and TV when looking at the final product then it seems to be the frame rate alone. As far as I've been able to determine from following the different topics of "film look" over the years, the biggest thing that makes film different from TV is the 24 fps vs. 30 fps (or acutally 29.97 fps). 24 fps gives a slightly more blurred effect to each image which makes it seem just slightly less real, or more imaginary, or more dream like.

Everything else can basicly be matched between film and TV as long as you know the medium and set up your scene to fall within the color range of the recording media.

What I would really like to see is a big special effects films like T3 or the Matrix shot and shown digitally at 96 fps to see how close to real it could get. As far as I know, there have never been any experiments done using super high frame rates to see which is prefered by the viewer.

Personally I'm not convinced from what I've read that 24 vs 30 fps is actually enough to make that big of a difference. It seems to me like you should be able to create an entertaining story without having to blur everything (like 24 fps does) to suspend thier disbelief.

My suspicion is that it is just like when analog tape was making the transition to CD ... people just haven't figured out how to use the CCD properly to create smooth pleasing images. Film has been around for a long time and a lot of knowledge has been gained about how to get the film to record a pleasing image. Everyone is still in the experimentation phase for CCD's. However, I'm sure that the knowledge gained from the ground breaking work done in the Star Wars prequels will have a major impact on how a CCD film is shot in the future. And the schools will eventually start picking up on this information and teaching it.

JBJones

>>the biggest thing that makes film different from TV is the 24 fps vs. 30 fps

What about dynamic range? It seems to me that film has higher dynamic range than video. High dynamic range really does improve image quality.

db-

Are you sure about that? I just asked about this on a home theater forum and here's what they had to say:

No consumer TV will display at these rates; it's too low to avoid flicker. They all display at 60 frames (or fields) per second.

The "reverse 3:2" is just a way to cleanly convert 60i -> 24p -> 60p (60p is the final display rate) when the processor detects video originating from film."

Sounds like they're saying you can't watch 24p stuff w/o converting it to 60p. So, are you sure HDTVs will show 24p material w/o converting it to something else?
I also read that most film originated movies, like the matrix et al, are encoded as 24p dvds. Our DVD players then convert the 24p material into 60i for viewing. If this is true, then what does the "reverse 3:2" on some tvs do?
Perhaps more importantly, if DVD players convert the 24p material into 60i for viewing- how would you get around this if your HDTV or digital projector can show 24p w/o conversion?
This is getting very confusing, but thanks for any help!

Flickering at 24fps is only a problem for conventional CRT displays. All newer LCD, Plasma, and DLP technology has much better persistance and can display virtually any frame rate without flicker.

I suppose if the incoming signal could bypass the television's clock circuitry you could have a DVD player duplicate 24p frames to 48p and show this on a conventional CRT display without flicker. It's probably not possible with conventional TV circuitry though as it's not intended to allow the input signal to dictate such a massive change in frame rate.