I'm considering purchasing the Canon HF-S100. I'm especially interested, yet cautiously skeptical, in this camera's 30p mode (internal 60i-to-30p deinterlacing, right?).

I currently deinterlace my raw footage (HV10 60i mts files of mostly high-action sports with moderate panning) with Avisynth filter TempGaussMC. I prefer to deinterlace before editing. This deinterlacing step takes forever, but quality output is worth the time, IMO. Crisp results with no detectable scanlines, jaggies, or artifacting. It looks sweet. The S100's 30p, if the quality is on par, would save me a ton of time.

A few questions:

• If the original shooting is in 1920x1080, does the 60i to 30p conversion maintain 1920x1080 (but 30p) resolution, or is it downscaled to something like 1280x720?
• How's the deinterlacing quality? Does the 30p contain any noticeable scanlines, teeth, blurriness, or other artifacting?
• Anyone compared this camera's 30p output with any 30p from a software-based approach (see my test idea below)? Results?

Test idea: Take both 60i and 30p footage of a spinning windmill. Deinterlace the 60i in software. Compare that to the camera-deinterlaced 30p footage.

I've seen sample S100 footage at youtube and vimeo, and it looks nice, but not sure if that was from captured 60i, 24p, or 30p, then encoded for those sites.

Thanks for any feedback, objective or subjective, anecdotal or first hand.

Everything else being equal, shooting in "True" progressive mode is better than de-interlacing (unless your video has little or no movement). De-interlacing does not fix the "different time each frame was taken".


Rich

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Thanks. So there's more than just deinterlacing going on to get 30p (or 24p).

And, just to clarify, I suppose you mean "True" progressive mode in the sense of enabling the 24p or 30p mode in the HF-S100, and not "native" progressive mode, which the camera doesn't appear to support.

All current (and last year's) VIXIA models have the ability to capture 24 and 30 progressive frames natively. The DiG!C image processing chip inside the camcorder then breaks up those progressive frames into fields and puts those fields into a 60i stream. For 30p, this is easy, as each frame produces two fields and those two are placed at the top and bottom in the 60i stream. For 24p, the chip does the 2:3 pulldown and some fields are duplicated according to the 2:3 telecine cadence. The end result is, regardless of the capturing frame rate (24p, 30p, 60i), the resulting video stream will always be 60i, but depending on how the frames were captured, it will contain different temporal information. Extracting true 30 progressive frames out of 60i stream can be done by many software utilities on both Mac and Windows, and some of them are even free. Extracting the 24p frames requires removing the 2:3 pull-down, which involves detecting the pulldown cadence from the interlaced stream and removing the duplicated fields. This feature is not available in the free software, but there are tools (such as Cineform's NeoScene, or After Effects CS4) that can automate the process.

Bottom line, long story short, the result from any current or recent VIXIA will produce MUCH better 30p video after de-interlacing than what you get when you de-interlace a 60i video that was captured at 60i.

For the life of me, I still don't understand, why does Canon insist on shoe-horning progressive frames (be it 24p, 25p or 30p) into a 60i (or 50i in EU models) stream. These are all HD camcorders. I don't think that ANYBODY who owns a HD camcorder is watching it on a SD TV. Therefore, every single target medium for this video will be able to support a progressive signal natively, whether HD TV set (via HDMI), or some computer software (Captured files, or AVCHD transfer). There is absolutely no point in putting progressive frames into an interlaced stream. All it does is forces those who consciously choose to shoot progressive to take the extra step of deinterlacing (and let's not even talk about pulldown removal) before they can even begin to edit.

This is just a colossal hassle and I'm still waiting for Canon to give a plausible explanation.

@vasic
So, if I record in 30p and then analyze the captured mts files (or do Match media in Sony Vegas project setup), it will show up as 60i? Then, I still have to instruct Vegas or some other renderer to de-interlace it to get the 30p I wanted in the first place?

If anyone can point me to one or a few sample 30p mts files for download from the HF-S100, I'd appreciate it. I just want to test out the workflow a bit on my home setup. That might win me over, or not.

Canon's 60i wrapper decision must have roots in some kind of marketing/up-selling/revenue/cost-cutting motivation. Like (my forecast only), "here are the new half-baked camcorders for 2009, then in 2010, after CES, we'll offer the same exact cameras, but with native progressive capture. Then you'll all buy those, too." Lame.

Yes. Most common workflow is to use some stand-alone deinterlacing software, such as JES Deinterlacer (on Mac) or something similar on Windows, transcoding the AVCHD stuff into AIC or ProRes (on Mac), or some AVI/WMV in Windows. This makes the editing easier than working with AVCHD directly, and the stream ends up 30p you wanted in the first place.


You're probably right, although I have a feeling that a possible excuse could be to make the video playable on Standard Def TVs via the built-in analogue composite output (NTSC in US, PAL in EU). I don't believe any one owner of ANY recent VIXIA (and iVIS, and Legria in EU and Japan) models had ever hooked up their camcorder to a Std-Def TV set using those analogue outputs. In other words, the only reason they're really there is probably the legacy from early days of HD, when SD compatibility was necessary. More than half of developed world already has HD screens at home, and those are the people who buy HD camcorders.

Let's wait for 2010 CES and the next generation of VIXIAs. Perhaps Canon will surprise us? I won't hold my breath...