Ok, you're "Butch"!

I knew it. ...

G

har di har har!!! :-)

well, you can create a 24p dvd, with the "cinema judder". so, you can capture em 1080/24p or 720/24p.

or you can create a 30i dvd (interlaced, with better motion, but with less definition and a few "interlacing artifacts". to use this format, you can record in 720p/60p (better) or 1080/30i

capturing directly in DV is a option, but will result lower color quality (as DV is 4:1:1)

"I'm considering an alternate format for the wedding. My choices on this camera are:

1080/60i should give you the best result with the least grief.

Edit on a 1080/60i T/L, render to 480/60i for the SD DVD in Best.

Bob.

Don't shoot 24p if it's going on a DVD.

"Don't shoot 24p if it's going on a DVD. "

Don't shoot anything ending in "p" if it's going on DVD.

Bob.

I've shot both 1080i60 and 720p60 for DVD. As Bob indicated, 1080i60 produces better results on DVD, but 720p60 is great for weddings IF you want to use slow motion. In that case, you can put the 720p60 footage on a 24p or 30p timeline, and slow the footage 24/60 or 30/60 for nice smooth slow motion.

/jerry

Don't shoot anything if it's going on DVD.

Now that's a great lot of help - NOT!

"Now that's a great lot of help - NOT! "

Indeed.

My objection to shooting anything with "p" in it is this.

I had thought with the advent of HDTVs we were over having to worry about line twitter and aliaing problems. We could happily shoot whatever based on a creative decision about the "look". You want it to look "filmic" shoot 24p/25p/30p. Put it on YT, put it on BD DVD or put it on SD DVD and all would be great.

I believe I was wrong. Somewhere along the line the HDTV manufacturers gave the public what they wanted or whatever and came up with a new set of confounding numbers to help sell their wares. We now have "motion flow" and 100/120Hz or "better yet" 200/240Hz HDTVs. With them seems to come the same set of problems we had with the old CRT TVs of line twitter and aliasing problems associated with shooting "p".

I shot my little narrative drama in 1080p25 and it looked great, very "filmic", fantastic. Then for some reason someone wanted a SD DVD of it. Playing it back on my new BD STB DVD player via HDMI into my new LG HDTV oh my. A couple of shots with lots of fine detail with high contrast edges and there it was, line twitter and jumpy twitchy things happening.

Years ago now I had an even worse problem, shot something in 720p50 to create an SD DVD and it was a disaster, the brick walls were just a pulsating mess.

All this makes me very, very nervous about shooting anything "p". Needless to say it might just be me and my camera. The EX1 is certainly capable of capturing very high resolution images that'll show up any issues with twitter when shooting "p" and delivering "i". To put that another way, I know shooting interlaced is goof proof no matter what you have to deliver. Almost for certain there are ways to shoot "p" and get a great result regardless of how it is being delivered. I'm yet to find one that doesn't involve going outside Vegas. Vegas simply lacks a good low pass filter plugin to wrangle the issues involved.

Of course if you're prepared to do thorough testing before you go out and shoot a wedding then ignore what I'm saying. On the other hand time and again I come accross people who with the best of intent give good advice based on their experience with their camera, their subject matter and their camera to others and then they have issues that are difficult to wrangle or beyond their capability to deal with. Personally I'm averse to giving people I don't well advice that could lead them into all sorts of issues to wrangle. I have made this mistake several times myself and lived to regret it, it might have been something blindingly obvious to me that they failed to do but it wasn't to the other party.

Bob.

The answer to OP's question of original post - shoot 1080/60i - that is your absolute best shooting format for workflow purposes into a DVD or even a Blu-ray media project.

DON't shoot 'P' for any DVD project - it is a suicide workflow.

You can use 24P for Blu-ray project - but it isabsolutely NOT worth it!!

Now just to be offering full disclosure - I do shoot 24P quite a bit -this is for greenscreen compositing and intermediate workflows - not the final output for a render to authoring software for disc projects.

Thanks all! And Tom...good talking with you!

Good shooting, Butch.

>I believe I was wrong

Bob, same with me. There are some old posts of mine here where I am asking why would anyone want to shoot interlaced if they had a cam capable of true progressive. Then recently I had a shoot which was to be made into a commercial DVD to be sold. I did quite a few test shots/renders/burns with interlaced and progressive and came to the same conclusion as you, with one exception. I wasn't able to tell any difference, twitter wise, between 1080i60 and 720p60. But I chose 1080i60 because at least with my cam it does better with low light and contains more chroma info.

/jerry

I have had the opposite experience as Bob and TeeTime. In fact, I advocated to TeeTime a 24p workflow a while back as something that I've found to work very well when delivering to DVD. Having said that, I do agree with Bob that going outside of Vegas is necessary. I don't know if this is what he meant, but I shoot 1920x1080 24p and edit on the same format timeline in Vegas. I render out at that same format to DNxHD, and then bring into Handbrake for the downconversion to 480 24p (at a high bitrate). I bring this file back onto a 480 24p timeline in Vegas to render out to a DVDA template. My testing showed this to give me the image that I prefer over both 30p and 60i source (EX1 is the primary camera with which I tested this). The areas of primary concern for me were plenty of detail, a film or non-digital look, and the least twitter or judder, etc. With 30p and 60i, I seemed to get a very digital, almost harsh, look (I think of it as the evening news look) that either had judder or was soft.

Since Hollywood studios shoot and deliver 24p DVD's, it seems to me that 24p cannot be the cause of the problems, such as line twitter.

I certainly advocate one's own testing and I'm not suggesting someone blindly adopt my workflow/settings. Rather, like others, I'm sharing my own experience. I'm curious to learn the source of the problem.

Some questions that I have are: if you shoot 1920x1080 60i, why does that lead to a better result at 480 60i when the lines do not map? Is the interlacing preserved or does the image just get softened? Why doesn't 60p work at least as well (if not better)? Since DVD players are supposed to do the inverse telecine from 24p to 60i/p (or higher), why doesn't this work with our DVD's when it works with Hollywood DVD's (again, my experience is that it seems to)? Perhaps I don't understand the issue, so I've posted this for the wisdom of others to be shared.

"I do agree with Bob that going outside of Vegas is necessary. I don't know if this is what he meant,"

Yes, that is what I meant. I'm certain there are ways to get different results, just not using only what ships with Vegas or can easily be added to Vegas.

"My testing showed this to give me the image that I prefer over both 30p and 60i source (EX1 is the primary camera with which I tested this). The areas of primary concern for me were plenty of detail, a film or non-digital look, and the least twitter or judder, etc. With 30p and 60i, I seemed to get a very digital, almost harsh, look (I think of it as the evening news look) that either had judder or was soft."

The EX1 certainly delivers more vertical resolution in 1080p25 compared to 1080i50.
If I know for certain I don't have to deliver a SD DVD I will shoot 1080p25. For a more "filmic" looks I've been taking Serena's advice: Detail Off, Cine4. regardless of shooting P or I.

"if you shoot 1920x1080 60i, why does that lead to a better result at 480 60i when the lines do not map? Is the interlacing preserved or does the image just get softened?"

The interlacing is preserved. Use De-interlace Method = Interpolate.

"Since DVD players are supposed to do the inverse telecine from 24p to 60i/p (or higher), why doesn't this work with our DVD's when it works with Hollywood DVD's "

I can't really answer that as shooting 24p isn't really an option for me due to problems with 50Hz lighting and CMOS sensors. Also that means I'd have to deliver 720x480.

Hollywood DVDs look better because:

Big budget productions can afford lenses that have over 1,000 lines resolution edge to edge with the iris wide open.

They don't use edge enhancement (detail) in the camera.

Their cameras record uncompressed 10 or 12 bit data.

Last but arguably most important, they spend a lot of time and money on lighting.

I have managed to pull off a few shots with the EX1 that even when converted to SD DVD holds up well against Hollywood. Getting every shot to look that good is utterly beyond me. You have to have a profound understanding of the limitation of the camera and it's optics and adjust what's in front of it to suit. For a serious production it's cheaper to use more expensive lenses and cameras. 1 stop more sensitivity means you need half as much light which can mean half the sized generator, smaller trucks, less cooling, less crew and a faster shooting schedule.

Bob.

Not only does big-budget production gather better sources of high-def media through optics, lighting, and grading - they DO NOT play around with our "free" encoding tools.

Usually they are using licensed $3,000 plus encoders with VBR and multiple pass grading at a level of something akin to key-framing level and in skilled hands of techs who know how to tweak. When you CAN manipulate the encode to DVD at that level you get some stunning pristine images.

Bob,

Thanks for your reply. I'm sure you didn't mean to suggest that I thought I could deliver results as good as Hollywood on my budget or was ignorant of the budget and skills of Professionals (with a capital P). If I implied that, I apologize. Rather, my point was that it must not be 24p (or "p" in general) that causes judder or line twitter. I might have missed it, but I didn't understand you to point out any flaw in 24p (or 25p) with regard to that.

I think that the point that Hollywood bugets and workflow allow better codecs, etc. makes a lot of sense. Again, I'm not daring to think I can achieve what they do. Rather, my point is that with the free (or affordable) tools available to me, including Handbrake and Vegas, I've not found reason to abandon 24p when delivering on DVD.

Also, I'm not sure that shooting interlaced because you are delivering interlaced makes as much sense if there is scaling involved. Bob - you seem to say that the interlacing is preserved. I don't quite understand how that is true when scaling is involved, as it sounded like it might be in this thread. From a previous thread, http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=773234, I understand the deinterlacing of 60i to apply to the HD footage to "create" a 60p image that is then scaled and then interlaced (these are my words of my understanding) I can see how the softening that might occur and, therefore, help line twitter and judder. But wouldn't shooting 60p be even better? (and my apologies for relentlessly putting 60p/i and 30p in, when many will have to translate these to apply to 50p/i and 25p).

Perhaps you or others could also address the following question that I've not seen a definitive answer to. If I have a bit rate of, say, 8500 kbps, if I have 24 frames rather than 30 frames, do I get the same or less compression per frame? Seems that I would get "less compression" or at least more bits per frame at 24 rather than 30. But, I might not understand how these codecs work - actually, I know I don't fully understand how they work, but I'm not technically ignorant either. The same applies to 24 vs 60i, as 60i would seem to have the same number of pixels per second as 30p (though I might not be thinking about that correctly).

>Perhaps you or others could also address the following question that I've not seen a definitive answer to. If I have a bit rate of, say, 8500 kbps, if I have 24 frames rather than 30 frames, do I get the same or less compression per frame? Seems that I would get "less compression" or at least more bits per frame at 24 rather than 30.

Jason, I think you are correct. My basis for this is a common technique for reducing the size (bandwidth) for internet videos is to reduce the framerate from 30fps to 15fps.

Also, I want to acknowledge how gracious you were to offer your consultation when I was doing my testing. You answered all my questions and supplied full details of your workflow, for which I am indebted. One possible reason I didn't achieve the results I wanted with progressive is I didn't test 24p, only 30p. When I get some time I want to revisit that. But for the particular project I was working on, a filmic looks wasn't desired by the client.

/jerry

"But wouldn't shooting 60p be even better?"

No. The problem is that with interlaced the vertical resolution must be limited to around 75% of the number of actual lines or Nyquist will bite you with line twitter. Good cameras such as the EX1 handle this by using line pair averaging when shooting interleaced. This has two effects. Firstly it reduces vertical resolution. Test results for the EX1 give it around 1,000 lines in P and around 800 lines in I. The second effect is to reduce noise hence others comments that shooting I you get more light. Quite easy to see this with the EX1.

Reagrding judder, yes I only shoot 25p but that is so close to 24p in regard to the judder issue that it doesn't matter. I have not noticed any judder issues that would not be explained by me breaking the rules that apply to shooting at such a low frame rate. Keep in mind that artificial edge enhancement does have an impact on the perception of judder. Also of course so does shutter speed and there's camera around that will shoot 24/25p that prevent you from locking the shutter at 180deg.



The argument regarding how easy 24p is to encode compared to 60i is complex. mpeg-2 and H.264 are using temporal compression. The number of frames is one thing, the difference between each frame which is what uses up the bit budget another. General consensus is it's a zero sum game. all else being equal. Noise and (again) artificial edge enhancement does have an impact.

Bob.

Bob,

Is there a problem of field order - HD and DVD using different field order and this can cause problem when rendering the HD footage to DVD ??

Shooting a 'p' will solve the field order issue, as it is actually a 'p' in whatever field order you have?

Udi

"Is there a problem of field order - HD and DVD using different field order and this can cause problem when rendering the HD footage to DVD ??"

No because Vegas always converts each frame to a full raster field. How it does that is determined by the De-interlace Method specified in the Project Properties as follows:

None: Really bad because it causes field aliasing e.g. big "teeth" artifacts on motion.
Blend: Merges both fields. This gives best resolution but produces small "teeth" on motion.
Interpolate: Each field's actual lines are interpolated to fill in the missing lines. This is the best method.

It is important that rendering is done at Best.

"Shooting a 'p' will solve the field order issue, as it is actually a 'p' in whatever field order you have?"

That would be true if there was a field order problem to start with.

Bob.

Bob, I am curious about your comment regarding "line pair averaging". I shoot with a Pany HMC150 and a search didn't turn up anything about line pair averaging in that cam. Yet, I wonder if line pair averaging could explain why I had less trouble with twitter when downrezing from 1080i to DVD, vs downrezing from 1080p30.

How can I measure or detect the number of vertical lines in my raw 1080i footage?

/jerry