CANON HF10 - Shoot 50i or 25P?

MattAdamson wrote on 7/19/2009, 4:15 AM

My camera FULL HD offers two modes 50i and 25 progressive. I'd like to know which mode I should use for the majority of the time. I mainly take standard home videos e.g. my son skate boarding / playing / days out at zoo e.t.c. Should I use 50i all the time for this or 25P?

When should I really think about using 25P, if I'm going to a bike race day out is 25P or 50i better for this? Also are both formats well supported in Vegas, or any issues I should know about?

Appreciate your thoughts as I can't seem to find much guidance in the manual at least.

Matt

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Comments

John_Cline wrote on 7/25/2009, 2:41 AM

"Sorry I dont agree that 25p only contains half as many individual images."

You don't have to agree with me, but you'd be wrong.

You'll note I didn't say "fields" or "frames" I said "individual images", meaning snapshots over a given period of time.

50i and 25p have the same horizontal spatial resolution. 50i has half the vertical spatial resolution, but twice the temporal resolution compared to 25p.

owlsroost wrote on 7/25/2009, 5:08 AM

John is quite correct, and definitely knows what he is talking about.

If the subject matter has fast motion don't even think about using 24p/25p/30p - it'll look like that 100-year old, juddery, obsolete technology called 'movie film' - this is 21st century High-Definition video we're discussing.....

The very clever TV engineers who came up with the idea of interlacing for video 50+ years ago did so because it's a better compromise of quality-versus-bandwidth/bitrate than progressive scan at half the image sampling/repetition rate - and this is still true today.

Tony

John_Cline wrote on 7/25/2009, 2:27 PM

Just to be perfectly clear, the 50i and 25p discussion is only about those living in PAL countries. For NTSC people, it's 60i and 30p.

farss wrote on 7/25/2009, 5:02 PM

I'd also add that there seems to be quite a difference between shooting 30p and 25p! I wish we had the option of shooting and delivering 30p in region50. 30p would seem to offer just enough increase in temporal resolution to retain some of the dreaminess of 24fps without all the other problems.

Bob.

kraz wrote on 5/30/2011, 1:33 AM

Sorry to resurrect a 2 year old thread.
I have my HF10 for 2 + years - and until now every final product I have created has been SD

I am preparing a video for next week that I decided I want to actually show in HD.
I will be playing from a media player (Briteview)

I have done my recording in 30P (PF30) - what should I set my Vegas properties and renter output to - If I want to keep this as unprocessed as possible.

Thanks
Allen

ritsmer wrote on 5/31/2011, 12:48 AM

Every time that I change the media player there seems to be no way around rendering to- and testing different formats. According to the specs the different media players can (theoretically) play a lot of formats - but when testing this you may see that some of the allowed formats give lousy results and some good results and even some again THE perfect result.

It is also a question about how high a bitrate that the media player accepts - again not theoretically - but in real use.

Looking back at my former practical tests with different external players and with Dlna televisions one format always pops up as the most reliable: mpeg-2 and either 50i or 25p (or even 50p from my new camera) and bit rates from 15 - 30 Mbps (VBR or CBR - again depending on what the player can digest)

fausseplanete wrote on 5/31/2011, 1:42 AM

some tools now can derive 50p (full frames) from 50i by motion estimation. I've done this many times (using AviSynth). In future I guess it will be more common and seamless. Many consumer TVs do "300 Hz" etc - and pretty sure motion estimation is used in at least some of them. So interlaced might be more future proof.