I'm going to try it soon. How is the smoothness of the motion. I know that Cineframe 24 captures at a staggered rate rather than 24 evenly spaced frames a second. When I've looked at Cineframe 24 in the past it looked really stuttery and I'd always thought it was because of this. In short, my question is how good does Cineframe 24 captured with HDlink's special 24p capture mode?

Also, how does video done this way compare to a plain old 24p render from HDV 60i footage?

Something tells me that if I ignored all the bad press about Cineframe 24 and just shot my projects that way and captured the footage with HDLink using the pulldown removal option, that I would be thrilled with the final look of my projects as released on 24p widescreen DVDs.

> my question is how good does Cineframe 24 captured with HDlink's special 24p capture mode?

It is very smooth. I hated CF24 the first time I used it. The stutter will drive you nuts! With ConnectHD converting to 24p there is absolutely no stutter at all. You still have a 24p cadence so you still have to keep your pans slow but no different that shooting 24p with any other camera.

> Also, how does video done this way compare to a plain old 24p render from HDV 60i footage?

As I said in my previous post, ConnectHD does a much better job at deinterlacing and reverse-telecine to 24p than capturing HDV 60i footage and using Vegas to convert to 24p. That’s not to say that some other process couldn’t have done a better job. Just that if all you have is Vegas and ConnectHD, let ConnectHD do it. Try both and see. Make sure you have clean vertical edges so its easy to see what’s going on in you test.

Now if you were transferring to film you would want to shoot 60i because the film transfer process is set up to deal with this. But if you’re making your own 24p DVD’s then using ConnectHD to remove the pulldown and capture 24p is a surprisingly nice look. Much better than CF24 alone.

~jr

Is it possible to print this 24p footage back to tape? Can you rerender it on a 60i timeline to make it compatible with Cineform Connect HD's print to tape feature?

Well I finally got around to testing out the Cineframe 24 / Cineform 24p capture. We had a big family barbeque and get-together today, and I shot some Cineframe 24 footage and transferred it with the Cineform HDLink set up to remove the pulldown.

On static shots it looked great, but on stuff like a slow walk around the picnic table or shots of my nephew skateboarding, it really wasn't good enough to use. Regular 24p is jerky enough, but with this footage there is an extra jerkiness that really is unatural. It is better than straight Cineform 24, but it still isn't smooth enough to use IMO.

After that, I tried some DVFilm HDV 60i to 24p conversions and they looked a lot smoother. I had attempted to do this a while back, but apparently you need to have ConnectHD or AspectHD installed in order for DVFilm to be able to do this conversion with the Cineform codec. I haven't done a Vegas 60i to 24p HDV conversion yet, so I don't know how it compares to the DVFilm one, but I must say, the DVFilm conversion looked really good. I bought DVFilm quite a while back and haven't used it since I got Vegas 6 (which does a better 24p SD conversion than DVFilm IMO). This was the first time I'd tried it on 60i HDV footage. I must say I'm really impressed.

What would be the workflow in Vegas to convert a directory of 60i HDV clips to 24p HDV clips?

I'm confused. How did you convert the CineFrame 24 with pulldown if you don't have CineForm 2.1 installed?
While I agree with you that the Vegas 60i to 24p looks better than DVFilm, I disagree that the CineFrame 24 looks poor when converted with pulldown in CineForm 2.1. I've been working with it a lot lately, and really appreciating it for the first time. (never liked CF24 in anything before, except as an effect)

OK, I'm stepping through individual frames now and I see what's going on and what the trade-off is between Cineframe 24 / Cineform 24P pulldown removal capture and doing the same 24p conversion with DVFilm. With the Cineframe24/Cineframe24p pulldown removal method, every fifth field is dropped. This gives you better looking stills but less smooth motion. With the DVFilm 24p conversion, every fifth field is blended in (I believe Vegas 6 does this as well). This gives smoother motion, but as you step through frames you can see the field-blended composite image every second frame. Neither approach is all that great after all.

I guess you're shooting with a Z1, so you have some useful options for getting to 24p. I've found shooting 50i and rendering to 24p in Vegas gives an excellent result. I started test shooting with traffic/people walking etc but you really need a subject that is more reproducable from test to test. I set up a pendulum with 4 second period, which has a large amplitude and is a subject exactly reproducable for each test mode. I shot this with various camera modes, captured these using the different methods in question and rendered them with the various options. Quick, easy and quantitative. I still have to check out resolution resulting from each workflow. Shooting Cineframe 25 does give a good result for 25fps but does result in reduced vertical resolution (not particularly obvious).

I have the HVR-A1 so I can't shoot any of the 50fps varieties of video. I can see where that would work well though. I have the latest version of CineForm now. When I originally tried DVFilm, I hadn't purchased it yet. To be honest, I haven't had that much experience with 24p. This was merely my first impression. I have to admit that on there is something about the look of footage done with the Cineframe 24/Cineform 24p capture that looks really good. Maybe I just have to be more careful with camera motion.

Haven't tried the latest Cineform/24P yet. Earlier tests suggested I'd get the best results by shooting 60i (I have an FX1, so 50fps isn't an option) and converting in Vegas on final render.

Vegas conversion looks good enough - Example at: www.hd-tv.us

I've also heard that if you're transferring to film, it's best to give the transfer house 60i, which means keeping everything 60i throughout the workflow 'til the final render is a good plan.

-Travis