I just purchased a Sony HDR-V1U and this Progressive Scan and 24p & 24n and 30p all is greek to me. All I want to do is shoot the Best quality possible Video and edit it on my Apple iMovie software. I don't care about making it look like "Film" or that it has the slight "Jidder" so it is like film. What are the Pro & cons to this? and should I shoot in what setting to get the best quality footage?

Thanks,
glwbear
glwbear@netmagic.net

Wow. This is a little bit of a can of worms. Every time this comes up you get a lot of people yelling on each side of the issue about what's "best." At best, "best" is subjective. Some people love the "film look" and swear that 24p is the way to get it, others love the look but hate 24p, and others couldn't care less about what everyone calls the film look.

Basically your video frame is divided into lines stacked up top to bottom to make up a picture. The Sony HDV cams shoot pictures 1080 lines tall. But here's the kicker -- since the earliest days of TV the lines haven't been written consecutively, all at once. If you were to number the lines, first you'd write the even lines, then the odd ones (or the other way around -- doesn't really matter for purposes of this discussion) Each set of lines is really only half of a frame since it contains only half the data. The lines are then interlaced together to make a frame. (Each set of lines is called a field.)

So this is called interlaced, and if the number of lines total 1080, it's designated 1080i. Or it might be called 60i, for the 60 interlaced fields making 30 complete frames per second.

Okay, now imagine you wanted to write an entire frame at once, all 1080 lines. That takes twice as much info so at the moment it's impractical to do that 60 times per second, but you can do it 30 times per second. In this case, all the lines are written consecutively, with no odd and even fields. Since the lines progress in order down the frame, this is called progressive, designated in your cam as 1080p30 or 1080/30p.

Just to complicate things further, there is another flavor of HDV from JVC that runs 720 lines tall at 60p. It's very nice-looking but is only available on the most expensive HDV cams and a few oddball other cams I wouldn't generally use. Sonys don't do 720. No one, as yet, does 1080p60.

In scientific tests on identical monitors which can handle both types, most people can't tell the difference between 1080i60 and 720p60. At best the estimates are that 720p60 provides about 10% better apparent resolution.

Because you sample the motion more times per second, 1080i60 is usually regarded as best for sports and fast motion, but many people prefer 30p for scenes with little or no motion because there are no interlacing artifacts (visible scan lines). It's really a personal choice.

24p only replicates the worst aspects of film -- the jitter and flicker you take for granted in movies. Note that the 24fps frame rate of movies was not chosen for any artistic reason; this was just the slowest they could put the film through the camera (because film stock was and is very expensive, being based on silver) and still get decent audio from the old optical audio track for cameras that wrote it and projectors that read it. Silent films ran even slower, which is why they appear speeded up today.

So after this incredibly long pedantic discourse, I'd suggest you stay with 60i on your V1. Besides, you can always try to monkey around with the look in post. You might want to shoot some 30p footage for fun, and you should then shoot the same thing at 24p just to see if you like it.

Hi! Here is some material you can look at for comparison:
http://sportsflashtech.com/video/workflow-divx.htm
Click on tipoff-original.mpg
and hit pause during playback. Look for the clarity of image,
location of the ball, and position of players hands.
This is the advantage of progressive scan.
Also notice the slight stuttery appearance of the overall flow.

Second, on this page,
http://sportsflashtech.com/video/index.htm
about halfway down the page, in section Panning Blur,
download the "Manual, 1/250sec shutter",
and playback with pauses to examine the action.
To get the max benefit from progressive scan, a fast
shutter rate is very important! This particular image
is a beautiful one, with excellent clarity of ball position!

It is mostly a matter of personal taste, and what you are trying
to record of course! Shoot your typical subject matter both ways
and compare!

FYI, Rich

Acgold7, it seems to me that one aspect of original question remained unanswered: what are 24p & 24n and 30p in regards to V1U camera. I've read some opinions that these modes on Sony cameras cannot produce true 24fps progressive because it is natively a 60i camera, and at best the 24fps mode should be regarded as cinematic effect. I don't know what exactly is meant by this statement. But I do know that Canon HV20 shoots 24p in telecined mode, and it is true 24p if reverse telecined. I guess my question boils down to, how the Sony camera shoots these 24p, 24n and 30p; are they just 3:2 pulldown (for 24p, like Canon does) or 2:2 pulldown (for 30p) or actual native 24fps (for 24n) cadences, and therefore can be considered true progressive modes after IVTC'ing them, or are they indeed just "cinematic effects". If they are just effects, I wonder how exactly these effects are obtained. Maybe these are some quirky cadences that normal editing app cannot process?

These are all really good questions, and I'll leave them to the V1 experts out there. I was just trying to answer the part about "Would someone explain Progressive Scan to me?" and "What are the Pro & cons to this? and should I shoot in what setting to get the best quality footage?" which I know a little about, and not the particulars of the V1 (or the HV20, for that matter) about which I know a little less.

FWIW, he got an identical answer in regards to shooting mode recommendations on another forum from someone who really is an expert on the fine points of these cams... so I wasn't too far off, just incredibly long-winded .