Progressive or Interlaced?

I'm sure this has been covered before, but what's the consensus?

Depends what you are shooting.


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Let's say a demonstration showing jewelry, bath products, etc. A "host" and a "guest"

So it's for broadcast on a cable channel or the like?

do you have a particular camera you'll be using?

Since you guys are being all rational and sensible and crap, I'll be the one to jump in with a purely emotional response.

Shoot 24p or 25p (depending on where you live) always, no exceptions.

Okay, it's not purely emotional. There's a grain of pragmatism in it. Let's say you live in North America, and thus are a citizen of NTSCdonia. Your choices are 60i and 24p. (Please don't be fooled into believing that 30psf is a valid choice; I've opined on that at length elsewhere and will not repeat myself here).

If you shoot 24p, it's absolutely trivial to turn that into 60i, if you need to do so for compatibility. For example, if you end up needing to deliver a broadcast master to a television station, you can simply lay your project off to tape with 3:2 pulldown ? which I believe all I/O boards will do in real time; at least the Kona boards will ? and call it a day.

On the other hand, say you shoot 60i, but you end up needing to deliver a progressive-scanned master for (say) internet delivery, or theatrical presentation. You're screwed. Seriously. You're just plain screwed. You descend, like Dante, into a Boschian nightmare of frame-rate conversions and interpolation where your choices are to sacrifice huge amounts of time to computer processing or huge amounts of money to hardware standards conversion, and your project will never, ever look right. You get so depressed by the results that you sink into a malaise of lethargy and substance abuse, and end up homeless and forgotten, living in a cardboard box in an alley, panhandling by day holding a handwritten sign reading "Will shoot 24p for food" and fighting off the increasingly fearless rats under the overpass by night.

Bottom line: 24p is compatible while 60i is not. So the purely pragmatic conclusion is always to shoot 24p unless you have an excellent reason not to. Don't overthink it; just go with what works.

If you subsist under the cruel oppression of the 50 Hz regime in PAListan, substitute 50i and 25p for 60i and 24p, as appropriate.

But no seriously, the other guys are right. It depends. There's no one answer that's right for everybody all the time. But what I just gave you is my answer, which is right for me and me alone, so take it for what it's worth.

Can't believe this is even being discussed. Interlacing should DIE.

I personally have been doing EVERYTHING for TV / Internet / etc in 720p Mastering Format for the last 2 years.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Thank you, Jeff:

I was hoping for at least one impassioned response one way or the other. Your explanation makes a lot of sense.

Sherry

And there's another one. Thanks.

>Shoot 24p or 25p (depending on where you live) always, no exceptions.

Do note that 24p is not a run and gun format (not that video/film is built for run and gun). The lower temporal resolution means you need to know how to frame up your subject to pan or track. 24/25p has a tendency to stutter on faster pans (which is of course, not filmic).



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grafixjoe Wrote:
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> Can't believe this is even being discussed.
> Interlacing should DIE.
>
> I personally have been doing EVERYTHING for TV /
> Internet / etc in 720p Mastering Format for the
> last 2 years.

Good riddance.
720p24 or 720p60?

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Er.....if your shooting fast action, better look at 1080i. Editors don't like some of the artifacts of interlace but...
If the web is your delivery, then it may make sense to shoot 720. However, in my experience, shooting progressive will blur to the point of distraction, more than you want on motion pans. 720 is the upper limit for web delivery so the point is why not keep the same standards throughout the project. It's always better not to transcode material if you don't have to.

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720 is the upper limit for web delivery

There is no upper limit for web - you can stick any size you like up there. It just so happens that certain sizes are supported better (or at all) in different players and on different hardware. I could post a video of a 120 megapixels if you could play it back!

YouTube for instance has the option for 4K and regularly offers 1080p HD as an option. 720 is not upper limit for web delivery. Not even close.

You could even make crazy pixel dimension Quicktime movies eg: 1600px x 10px for a website if you wished.

There is no universal "Web Video Standard" only Broadcast and Film standards that we translate on to the web.


__________

p Verus i
__________


I personally hate interlaced footage it looks cheap, it feels cheap it bugs the hell out of me.

If you need to do fast action without the motion blur or judder from lack of temporal sampling then look at 50p or 60p (or higher if your camera allows you to overcrank the framerate.



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Ben King Wrote:
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> 720 is the upper limit for web delivery

> There is no universal "Web Video Standard" only
> Broadcast and Film standards that we translate on
> to the web.
>
> My point being what is practical for most users to view (720 p)because of file size and streaming issues not what is possible under some conditions or theoretically possible.
> __________
>
> p Verus i
> __________
>
>
> I personally hate interlaced footage it looks
> cheap, it feels cheap it bugs the hell out of me.

Well I won't argue about personal taste. However, if you've been watching TV for the last 60 years, then welcome to interlaced. And...most HDTV broadcast today is 1080i with a few exceptions. In the end, content is King (no pun intended).
>
>

Jeff, I like your emotions. Interlaced is for girls.

>I personally hate interlaced footage it looks cheap, it feels cheap

I won't say it looks cheap. I have seen pretty great looking high end stuff shot in interlaced. I have seen film look like video and video look like film. Nothing bad about a format. It just has to be done right. Personally, I like 25p shot on the RED by a good DOP with good art direction and storyline, but that's just me.

>If you need to do fast action without the motion blur or judder from lack of temporal sampling then
>look at 50p or 60p

The big thing about interlaced versus progressive is that you need to know what you are shooting and frame up your subject. Hollywood does everything in 24p, including their action movies. You can't feasibly deliver 1080p50/60 today, not on most existing formats.



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My point being what is practical for most users to view (720 p)because of file size and streaming issues

Nah. 720p24 is pretty much the least-common-denominator now. iTunes is 720p, Youtube is 720p (at least), Vimeo is 720p, Netflix is 720p. The only major outlet that doesn't do at least 720p, that I know of, is Hulu. And god bless 'em, they're becoming increasingly irrelevant with that silly "Hulu Plus" fiasco.

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However, if you've been watching TV for the last 60 years, then welcome to interlaced. And...most HDTV broadcast today is 1080i with a few exceptions.

Technically correct, but not really correct. If you take live television out of the mix ? news and sports ? virtually everything in NTSCville is shot in 24p, with 3:2 pulldown added at the last stage to make it compatible with the 60 Hz timebase. In PALdonia, it's 25p and 2:2 pulldown.

"virtually everything in NTSCville is shot in 24p"

Really? Or do you just mean primetime network broadcasting?

All the best,

Tom

Really. Programming, commercials, basically everything that's not broadcast live.

It's partially a holdover from the days before videotape was practical. If you wanted to record something for later broadcast on television, you did it on film. Either with straight-up film cameras, or with a kinescope.

Amusingly, experiments were done back in the day with recording to videotape. "The Twilight Zone" shot six episodes to videotape in their second season, as a cost-saving measure. The experiment was a catastrophe. The resulting shows looked so terrible, as a result of the different frame rate and undesirable motion quality, that the experiment was never repeated. They went right back to shooting on film.

You'll still occasionally see a major broadcast that's shot interlaced. It's usually part of a gimmick, like a live-to-air episode. This happened just recently, though I forget what the program was. Maybe "30 Rock?" Some show I don't personally watch, so the name didn't stick in my head. But I did hear from an industry acquaintance that a major local affiliate was flooded with complaints because the live-to-air episode looked so crappy.

There's a whole lot of other video that's not broadcast and being shot in NTSC that's interlaced.

All the best,

Tom

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You can't feasibly deliver 1080p50/60 today, not on most existing formats

If you have a simple RAID setup (storage is getting cheaper all the time) and a 2008+ Mac you can do 1080p50/60 and deliver on the web. It might be a big download or require having a damn fast stream but it is not only feasible but here is a very quick example. Note: you will need at least a 1920x1080 screen to view it in full-screen. Or larger if you view it in the web browser.

[www.loudandfast.co.uk]

Literally chucked this together in FCP as 1080p60 ProRes HQ @~52MBps (430Mbps) a simple 2 HDD software RAID 0 could handle that!). Then compressed as a rough 3500Kbps h264 .mov in and uploaded to the web.
(Apologies for not tailoring the compression and for the footage in the background but you can see the 1080p LOD from the text. But it illustrates my point).

Like I said earlier; you can deliver anything you want - the downside is that as you increase the complexity of the delivery (in terms of playback requirements) the smaller the audience able to view it.

However I think as Jeff et al all are "ever-so-slightly" (please note UK sarcastic quote-marks) hinting at is that 24/25p delivery is not only perfectly adequate but also (in our opinion) easier to work with and more pleasing on the eye. Certainly you have to know what you are shooting but then imho if you don't know how to shoot then you absolutely should not be shooting! Get trained. Then give me the good stuff

But as far as delivery is concerned you only need worry about standards for TV, Film (including 3D) and web-video-portals like YouTube and Vimeo et al.

If you are delivering to your own webspace (or a host that allows it) you can do what the heck you like.

With HTML 5 and CSS3 you will start to see some very funky things being done with webvideo and it will come more and more in all shapes and sizes, frame and bit rates.



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Oh forgot to link a 4K YouTube





You need to navigate to the YouTube page and select "Original" from the quality settings (360p default).



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Thanks to everyone for a spirited discussion. So, let me get this straight. The consensus seems to be a preference for P as opposed to I where feasible. But use I in only certain circumstances such as... This is where I get lost. Do you use I for fast motion say, maybe a sporting event or news footage and P for everything else?

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"virtually everything in NTSCville is shot in 24p"

Boy is that wrong - dead wrong...at least in my little corner of the USA where everything I do is 720p / 1080p / 29.97 / 59.94 (at least all that I work on). I have delivered ONE 23.98 / 720p project in 2.5 years and it was to the west coast...and it was transcoded from a 59.94 composition.

There are a lot of inaccuracies in this thread...probably because it's based on the emotional rejection of interlacing. Nobody mentioned the absolute butchering of multi-layered compositions & motion graphics that are interlaced. * Hic - barf *

I would stay away from interlacing...but that's just me.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.