Thanks Bob, but still some questions.

1. Why is shooting in 25p so much different from shooting in 50i?
I do not see me doing any different behind the camera whatever format I selected from the menu.

2. I have the Panasonic AG-DVX100A (102B in fact), which has two 25p settings 25p and 25p Advanced. According the manual both settings are converted to 50i. Again, according the manual the normal 25p setting results in "drop of picture quality" while the advanced setting "can lead to quality loss".

Ooops! I hit the Post Message button by accident.

Anyway. Both remarks in the manual does not encourage me much in using either of the 25p format settings.
While in both cases the manual mentions that the output format in both formats is 50i.

Small wonder that people like me are getting puzzled by the whole format, color spacing etc. issue.

One more question about Vegas.
In the video project properties I can select various settings that will have an effect on the way I see my footage in the preview window.
But this project settings do not effect the output in any way since I render to DVDA which is a preset template anyway ignoring settings like Pixel Aspect Ratio etc.?
Or do I have to select the Template PAL DVD Widescreen and select None (progressive scan) as Field order: If my footage is 25p so that is has an effect on my rendered output?

Sorry fro being so ignorant in the field of video formats.

~Dries.

Well first of all i have no idea of how one can arrive at 25p or 25pA, the 'A' as far as I know only has any meaning for 24p which gets turned into 60i. Shooting 24pA means the pulldown can be completely removed to restore 24fps. Without that mode you do loose a little when removing pulldown.
But when shooting 25p there's no pulldown so I'm at a loss to explain that one.
There's a zillion sites that explain 24p and 24pA, no need for me to duplicate their efforts.

Now when you acquire footage at 25p what you usually end up with on tape is 25psf, 25 frame per second split over 50 fields per second. Nothing from then on can really change that. The temporal resolution is one image every 40mS, this is exactly the same as film that's been telecined to video. At any point down the chain you can merge those two fields back into frames and no need to do anything fancy to it. It will display very well on progressive display device such as plasma and LCDs, it'll still look just fine on CRT displays as well.
Anyway rather than me try to badly explain this, best idea is do some research, plenty of really good info out there, stuff by Adam Wilt is always worth a read.
And shoot some footage at 25p and 50i, capture it into Vegas. Get some panning shots with strong verticals, power poles etc, you'll soon see the difference on the Vegas preview window, note that the 25p footage has no interlacing artifacts.
The down side to shooting 25p is the lack of temporal resolution can introduce motion artifacts, the lack of temporal resolution can make extended viewing of fast moving images tiring to watch. However it is the look of film, that's far from all there is to it of course, but it is certainly part of it. And most modern display devices are only progressive display which means they have to de-interlace, some do a very good job and other a very hohum job.

How you deal with 25p footage in Vegas or any NLE only matters when it comes to FXs. If you tell the NLE the footage is interlaced it has way of knowing otherwise as far as I know and will render the FXs as interlaced, not a huge difference visually but it's still noticable if you look carefully, things like page curls will show it up.
With some NLEs you can get them to render the FXs as progrssive in which case the FXs will match the look of the film exactly.
When all else fails, do some experimenting, Vegas is great for that.
Bob.

http://www.dvxuser.com/ is the place where this subject has been covered extensively.

BTW, The DVX DVD (with the bundled book), see: http://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/, was for me a wonderfull ressource for "under the hood" explanation of DVX100 fonctions and features. Get it and you will not regret it i think.

I very often use the true progressive mode (24 or 30 fps) of the Panasonic, Vegas celebrated capabitiy in term of 24 P editing and Architect for DVD delivery (yes, architect can author Progressive scan DVDs) .

True Progressive scan will give you definitive plus ( twice the vertical resolution, so you can get the much different film look, twice the resolution when displayed on a computer monitor, perfect 720 x 480 stills, etc.). The trade off is the loss of temporal resolution (so, use slooooooow panning please...), and the need for more lighting when you shoot.

BTW, this is a wonderfull cam...

Just one small problem, the man has the PAL version of the camera which as far as I know doesn't have 24p!
What he does get is 25p, just my opinion here but my thought is that's a significant improvement over 24p. 24p yields a resolution of 720x480 against 720x576 for 25p on the PAL version, hardly an insignificant improvement! This gives you the best of both worlds, you can deliver 25psf content with as much res as the camera / glass is capable of and quite easily convert to 24p with a 4% slowdown for NTSC delivery.
What you do loose if you're a NTSC shooter is a 60i mode but if you're only interested in shooting for the film look that's hardly an issue.

BTW the res increase from 60i to 24p or 50i to 25p is 30%, that's from Panasonics own white paper. Unless of course you were de-interlacing by ditching fields in post.
Bob.

Okay guys, complicated stuff still.
Indeed I have a 25p PAL machine. And found out that my 102BEN model does not have the 25pA(dvanced) setting found in the 100B models sold in the Western World. My 102BEN camera lacks that particular option but then, it came very cheap.

Thanks for your support, it requires some further research and trial & error. Life was much simpler back when we still used film.

~Dries.

Seeing as how it's Christmas and I'd like you to enjoy your Christmas present here's another one from someone in the Great Southern Land. There's no such thing as 25pA, your camera isn't missing anything :)
On the NTSC version you get 24p and 24pA modes, that refers to the pulldown mechanism, there's no simple way to fit 24 frame into 60 fields so the fields get split across frames using either a 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 cadence, the latter is 24pA. The advantage of the Advanced mode is the pulldown can be completely removed to restore the exact same 24 frames per second.
In the PAL world as each frame is simply split into the two fields the original discrete frame is much easier to restore, just blend the two fields back together and voila.
So not only did you get a great camera at a good price, you're also blessed with living in a PAL country where live is both simpler and seen in higher resolution.
Bob.

Thanks for clearing than up Bob.
Glad I learned I am blessed living in the PAL world.
Never looked at it that way before.
Happy Holidays!

~Dries.

Perhaps I'm a little bit late coming into this conversation, but the one MAJOR thing you lose going to 25p is temporal resolution. You're only getting 25 snapshots per second, rather than 50. That translates into having to take special pains regarding camera pans and handholding in general--otherwise, you'll drive the audience nuts with strobing artifacts.

Far from it, temproal resolution in progressive mode is FAR MORE true to the CCD resolution, then interlace ever could be... this if course from progressive sourced material, NOT converted 50i to 25p...

consider that each frame is captured as you see it, not split into two fields (50i) but two consecute fields with the same frame information (2:2 pulldown in other words... )
Basically with field capture there is alot more information being recorded within each seperate field, your not actually capturing 50 frames, your capturing 50 fields (50 half frames) so it might look like your capturing more info, but in fact youre not coz your only recording half the resolution of what your seeing PER FIELD.. ...
This is why i prefer 720p ANYDAY over 1080i.. when watching HD material, 720p clearly offers a sharper, more filmic MOTION response (note i left out the film look argument) dont start me on film look.. lol)
When watching this material on a HD LCD projector (i use a Pana AE700 HD projector for monitoring.. dont ask me about the price of globes, my wife will kill me if she found out.. ) When i can I also use a vizio 46' SD panel or a 50' HD Panel and on both units 720p clearly outshines 1080i, now this is 1080i recorded from a Z1 downscaled to 720p to match upscaled DVX100e widescreen (note cropped and stretched to 16:9) (PAL) footage... ...

al these issues with strobing etc is identical to issues you would find shooting with real film.

This can be alleviated, with good camera motion, proper shutter settings and of course a decent story to tell...

Perhaps I misstated my point. For a given data bandwidth (in this case, the data rate going to the videotape), you can have lots of spatial resolution, or lots of temporal resolution, but not both.

Interlace gives you tons of temporal resolution (because you're getting 50 images per second) but because it's interlaced, the vertical spatial resolution is halved. Intelligent deinterlacers can try to boost the vertical resolution by filling in with information from a previous or future field, but that's another story.

Progressive gives you full vertical spatial resolution for each image or frame, but you only get 25 such frames every second. If you get sloppy with camera movement the audience will groan from all the strobing.

I just don't understand this whole obsession with "filmic motion." The 24 frame per second rate was ultimately determined by economics. It was the slowest frame rate at which the illusion of acceptable motion could be achieved. Film was (is) expensive and they didn't want to use any more of it than was absolutely necessary. Why everyone is still hanging on to this magic 24 frame per second rate is totally beyond me. It's like hanging on to the limited frequency response, ticks and pops and surface noise of old audio records or wishing my Acura TL drove like an old Volkswagen Beetle.

If we're talking about total information as pixels per second, then 1920x1080 at 29.97fps (or 1920x540 at 59.94fps) is 62,145,792 pixels of information per second. 1280x720 at 59.94 fps is 55,240,704 pixels per second and 1280x720 at 24fps is 22,118,400.

Give me higher spatial resolution AND higher temporal resolution any day. 1080p at 59.94fps sounds pretty good. 24fps just isn't high enough, it's just too limiting. Strobing on pans is simply unacceptable. It's almost 2006 for crying out loud, technology has moved beyond 24fps. 24fps is occasionally appropriate for dramatic effect, but I sure as heck don't want to watch everything at 24fps.

John

The 24 frame per second rate was ultimately determined by economics. It was the slowest frame rate at which the illusion of acceptable motion could be achieved.

It was the slowest framerate at which the illusion of acceptable motion could be achieved WITH SOUND, or else it would have been slower. :-)

John:
The obsession with 24p is probably because many people are obsessed with trying to make their footage look like film (which is the golden standard). Why film is the golden standard may be partly because it has technical advantages (24p not one of them) but also because most people can't afford it. Conversely, most people follow the expensive is better line-of-thinking (and it does make sense to do so as long as you're flexible about the exceptions). That being said, I still believe film is a better origination format than miniDV for visual quality.

2- Something else to consider is that 24p and 30p have a very nice look to them, which the viewer may find subjectively better compared to 60i. If you have Vegas 6, check it out for yourself by converting some footage (i.e. try some panning footage, and a scene with people walking in it).

60i looks a little weird when viewing on a CRT TV (a CRT is important! A computer monitor will not show the difference).

3- In my opinion, I think the world TV standards should move away from interlaced capture. While it was a very good compromise back when TV was invented, interlacing just looks weird. And with the new technologies available (LCDs, etc.) it won't make much sense... one thing being that you can't convert from interlaced to progressive.

More related information:
http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_301-editorial.html

35mm is expensive?
Well compared to DV25 yes but compared to the top line digital film cameras it's positively cheap.
Bob.

Despite the 25p being held in an interlaced stream when it goes to video it is still very advantageous to shoot in 25p mode (amking sure to tell Vegas that the clips, and the project setting is set to progressive scan.

When you render to Mpeg2 for DVD the compression is much more efficient. Also, when you shoot 25p make sure that in the render settings for the DVD MPEG file that you set it to 'progressive scan' as well. This will enable a DVD player with progressive scan capability to more easily display your video as it should.

With regards to hanging onto low frame rates, I see interlaced vs progressive as a horses for courses thing.

With interlacing you do get a much higher temporal resolution, and therefore smoother motion. But this is at the expense of a lesser percieved picture resolution, line twitter, and less efficient DVD compression, not to mention the 'tearing' that occurs during movement due to the different fields being updated alternatively.

Further to this, while progressive scan strobes it mustn't be forgotten that instead of strobing interlacing smears movement instead. So its not a free lunch whichever way you look at it.

Glenn said, "That being said, I still believe film is a better origination format than miniDV for visual quality."

I absolutely agree, film has it all over video in every respect except in the case of temporal resolution. Although, film can be shot at any frame rate, so temporal resolution is only an issue when it is shot and projected at 24fps. I have shot a lot of film, so I am not strictly a viedo guy. I just don't like the limitations of 24fps, no more than I ever liked the idea of dragging a piece of diamond through a groove on a plastic disc in order to listen to music. I love the look of film, I don't like the motion of 24p film.

I'm not a big fan of interlacing, but I am a big fan of temporal resolution. Like I said, my preference would be 59.94fps 1080p and that's probably not far off. There are currently "reasonably" priced displays that will support it. We already have 720p at 59.94.

"Something else to consider is that 24p and 30p have a very nice look to them "

In certain circumstances. I think it's just that we're used to the film cadence and we have been conditioned to like that. Had we had high temporal resolution movies from the beginning, we would probably be turned off by 24p.

John

Back in 1988 when my company was proposing an NTSC-compatible version of HDTV, we proposed a mastering format at an IBC conference in Brighton that year. Back then, the Europeans were refusing to consider anything other than 1250/50i, and the Japanese were stuck on 1125/60i. So we said, "Look, the whole point of a mastering format is that (1) it has resolution to burn, so transcoding to either 1125 or 1250 is transparent, (2) it uses a scan line number that has a friendly transcoding relationship with 1125, 1250, 525, and 625, and (3) it is also very friendly towards the traditional HD standard, 35mm film.

So what did we propose? A new format, called "HDPro", which used 1500 progressive scan lines, an electronic shutter, and a 24Hz frame rate. Our thinking back then was that the temporal thing was not going to be an issue some day when digital processing would be able to interpolate as many intermediate frames as needed. Sure enough, Microsoft has demoed WMV with interpolated frames.

HDPro never caught on, in part because we were too focused on solving TECHNICAL issues, when the real issues were political.

This make me wonder; when we get to HD DVDs and LCD displays and all HD over-air transmissions, will everything be progressive and interlaced be gone for good?

There's going to be lots of legacy interlaced footage... i.e. stock footage. Also there would be some old interlaced programming that broadcasters would like to re-run.

2- You might also end up with a situation like AM co-existing with FM radio, or VHS still kicking around (i.e. players that do both VHS and DVD). NTSC/60i and PAL/50i broadcasting might still kick around for a while, as not everyone will shift over to HD as there's really not much need.

Simon,
I've never seen any smearing due to the use of interlacing on a CRT display. That problem only arises when interlaced video is displayed on progressive scan devices such as LCDs and plasma.
And yes, CRT display systems are as dead as the Dodo, even Sony don't make them anymore. Which leads one to ask why are Sony so keen on blackmailing the EBU into sticking with 1080i?
Answer, at the time they didn't have a camera capable of 1080p, they do now though I believe.
Bob.