Which shooting format, 60i or 24p

Editguy43 wrote on 2/23/2013, 11:46 AM

1080/60i or 1080/24p which one is better for everday shootong not for clients but personal stuff mostly, but also for some professional shoots as well.

I have always has my camera set for 1080/60i and it looks good to me. I was watching some youtube stuff on the new nikon 7100 coming out and the buys talking about it say "don't use 60i"

It got me wondering what should I be using?

Paul B

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larry-peter wrote on 2/24/2013, 6:10 PM

In my mind, "film look" and "looks like film" are different things. My computer monitor can display 24 separate images in one second if the player can muster it - although the refresh rate will mean the screen updates much more frequently displaying duplicate images. Granted, no display will ever look exactly like film because you have to deal with refresh rate and interlacing, but it is a definite look, and much different than 30, 60, or any interlaced frame. All subjective.

Chienworks wrote on 2/24/2013, 7:56 PM

Andy, quite true. The human visual system is capable of processing about 25 full 'field of view' frames per second. 24 is just a hair below this so the brain can actually see each frame individually change to the next. In fact, this is one of the big reasons why 30 was chosen for television, as it's sufficiently above what the brain can follow. Television has always been smoother than cinema.

60p? 72p? 120p? Pretty much overkill for normal recording and playback. It's kinda like using 192KHz for audio recording. It's useful at the editing stage because there's more data to work with, but for final output it's a waste because the ear can't distinguish the difference so it's just a waste of space and bandwidth. Yes, i'll grant that there may be occasional momentary bits of fast action in small sections of the field of view that the brain might be able to follow once in a while, but overall, the visual system has to wait a full 25th of a second to "reset and refresh" itself before the brain can interpret the next image.

Come to think of it, our brains have been able to handle amazing resolution and color space at that frame rate for eons, way before XVGA and GPUs come on the scene. Not bad for a sloshy squishy bit of salty cholesterol up between our ears.