60fps (or 50fps) does look much smoother than 30.

One can render 30fps footage at 60fps but what does Vegas do? Does it just emit two identical frames or does it interpolate?

 

In Vegas you can choose between frame doubling or frame interpolation when rendering 30fps to 60 fps, by switching off or on resampling, but you will never get the smoothness of an 60fps recording.

Where is this config? Is it in the rendering template?

No, it's not in the rendering template. Depending on your Vegas version, you can deselect resampling for each selected event ( right click/switches), in older Vegas versions. In Vegas 14 you can select resampling project based in the project settings.

Twixtor usually makes a good job of interpolating, but it seems to do it by warping between the two frames on each side. If you have a foreground object moving in front of a background, some background detail becomes hidden, which is no problem, but other detail previously hidden becomes revealed. With a fast moving foreground object, the result can sometimes be quite bizzare. You say that you have a simple scene, so you may not have this problem.

In Vegas when you resample 30 frames to 60 frames, the missing between frame is an interpolation of the frame before and after, which gives a blurred/ghosted picture for a moving object. This looks quite natural when playing. Twixtor is nice for slomos but overkill for this purpose.

The typical footage will be shot from an aircraft, so no objects moving relative to the background. Example:
https://vimeo.com/180135440

The above was shot at 1080P 50fps 25mbits/ses, with an older camera which would not do 4K usefully. Some nice footage starts at 14:00.

As a separate issue to which there seems no good answer, I can shoot 4K 30fps at 100mbps but the 256GB SD card will not last long enough for some flights (I run the camera unattended for obvious reasons) so I am likely to often be shooting at 4K 30fps 60mbps (which outlasts the fuel tanks) which may yield a *worse* image quality than shooting at 1080 60fps 60mbps but if I shoot at 1080-anything I end up stretching the image due to unavoidable the post lens correction crop.

I am quite keen to do any interpolation in Vegas - I have Pro 13 and Pro 14.

The typical footage will be shot from an aircraft, so no objects moving relative to the background. Example:
https://vimeo.com/180135440

 

Nice footage.

My advice: Since your footage is not too fast moving, I would forget the 1080p50 recording and would go for 4Kp30 recording only. It will probably play not that smooth but will show you so much more crisping details of the landscapes even when you downscale that footage to 1080p30.

Just last week, I did some tests with comparing 4K Cameras recordings made directly in FHD and recordings made in UHD and downscaling those to FHD with Vegas. The quality of the downscaled recordings is unbelievable much better than the FHD direct recordings.

I also received last week the new YI 4K+ actioncam which is the first actioncam with 4K 50/60fps ability, maybe this is also a good camera for you.

Ofcourse you will than still have the dilemma that the SD card will nost last long enough for some flights, but a solution to that could be the option to use that YI 4K+ camera as a second camera. The YI has an option (through an app) to start recording from a given GPS position.

Interesting :) However that camera has a huge frontal area, a relevant thing in ~200mph airflow, and that was one reason for choosing the Sony. And the Sony X3000 was the first one to do stabilisation at 4K, which is useful even in this application. The real solution for storage is a large SSD like the professional gear (Red etc) uses.

Very useful input about UHD to FHD. This is as I would expect but I will do some tests to see if 60mbps (4K) and also 30fps is enough. If it is it would be great because then I can shoot everything in that setting.

Otherwise, I have found 50/60fps to look dramatically better for this sort of stuff (basically any movement) than 25/30fps.

Interesting :) However that camera has a huge frontal area, a relevant thing in ~200mph airflow, and that was one reason for choosing the Sony. And the Sony X3000 was the first one to do stabilisation at 4K, which is useful even in this application.

That's true, the YI 4k+ frontal area size is about twice of the size of Sony X3000. The YI 4K+ has also stabilization at 4K, but only in the 25/30 fps modus. It has also built-in lens correction.

Can you post the outcome of your tests UHD30fps=>FHD30fps against FHD50fps?

I will do; it will take me some time unless you want it from walking along :)

I found that walking is a bad way to test 4K cameras because all you need is a bit of foliage (grass or forest) in the frame and that will eat all the bandwidth and more and the result looks like a digital camera from 2002. 1080P 50fps at 100mbps just about works...

The problem with your footage is that due to the constant movement of the airplane each frame is different, so you will need the max bitrate.

dont forget to try avisynth method for 60p. it makes wonder by me :)

"The problem with your footage is that due to the constant movement of the airplane each frame is different, so you will need the max bitrate."

Isn't mpeg compression supposed to deal well with linear movement? The old mjpeg (used on DAT tapes) had no inter-frame relationship.

Isn't mpeg compression supposed to deal well with linear movement?

First person movement often needs much higher bitrates than other scenes. I certainly see this with my mountain bike footage, with mounted camera, which I do stabilize a certain amount. First person video game people often complain about online video quality.

Yes, inter frame motion vectors do detect and can compress movement well. This primarily works with things moving through the camera field. With a first person view there is a constant scale/zoom factor between each frame in the video stream. The movement and scale combine making compression of these scenes difficult. The encoder most often has to resort to raising the quantizer to meet a bitrate target and this effectively lowers quality.

I think compressing biking footage would be really hard, especially with a camera stabilised with something less than a DJI-type mount (there are a few of those on the market; I have the DJI smartphone one, which I got for skiing). Bike footage is a very fast moving image and some of it is much closer to the camera (has a faster angular movement) so a motion vector system won't work well. Throw in some camera shake and...

Flying footage moves very slowly and all of it is at "infinity". It is only during takeoff and landing that you get close-up stuff and then if you look at the runway tarmac you see that the bitrate is completely unable to cope. Even at 50mbps 1080 it is barely able to, and at the ~5mbps you get on Vimeo Pro it breaks up completely.

I will do a test in flight but it won't be for a few weeks because I am waiting for some bits.

OK here are a few videos. Vimeo downgrades everything to about 5mbps which makes comparisons difficult but all of these can be downloaded using the Download button there and then you get the original size. Had I put them on dropbox, the account would get shut due to the volume of downloads and I don't have webspace on which I can put the 4.9GB which these add up to in their original upload form.

All were rendered to 1080P in Vegas 14.

This is the most common camera mode I propose to use. It is the X3000's top mode. It will run for 5.5hrs which is not enough in some applications and then I will use the 60mbps setting which appears to be just as good (so I might use it all the time.

4K 30fps 100mbps https://vimeo.com/223096669

This interpolated video shows the interpolation clearly if you freeze a frame (pressing the space bar in VLC, etc) and then any man-made "sharp" objects have a shadow which has a 50% opacity. In normal playback I don't see this video is smoother than any of the others, and 30fps appears perfectly sufficient for this kind of footage

4K 30fps 100mbps interpolated to 60fps https://vimeo.com/223097211

1080P 60fps 60mbps https://vimeo.com/223097766

The following two are ground based and show very similar scenery. I find it impossible to see any difference between them and thus conclude that 60mbps is perfectly fine for 4k recording in this case. However I don't have a 4K monitor and the only way I can see 4K scenery is by doing a snapshot in VLC, and even then I can't see any difference!

4K 30fps 100mbps https://vimeo.com/223091979

4K 30fps 60mbps https://vimeo.com/223098101

The later of the above videos also have a bit of lens correction (with a tiny bit of crop - about 5%) which shows up as a more straight horizon.

Some also have the exposure reduced by -0.7 which helps to prevent bright clouds getting washed out; these look darker as a result. I am not sure how to best deal with this in Vegas because I don't want to introduce saturation there either. Maybe I can use a tone curve function (the equivalent of brighten up shadows in photoshop, etc).

All the videos have a bit of wobble whose origin I don't know. It looks like there is vibration; that normally produces the "jello" effect but this camera was quite rigidly mounted. I was using the full stabilisation of the X3000 (both optical and software) although I believe in 4K it is optical only. I tried stabilisation in Vegas but v14 crashes when doing that (a bug).

In case anybody is interested, the X3000 camera has certain issues when externally powered
http://community.sony.com/t5/Action-Cam/X3000-wifi-bluetooth-remote-control-while-USB-powered/td-p/635517
The internal battery lasts about 1 hour when recording in 4K; wifi and bluetooth don't seem to affect it much.