24p or 30p: Second Thoughts

Last week I posted a short article about how I was debating shooting an upcoming project in 24p. As luck would have it, I had pretty much made up my mind I was going to try shooting in 24p when I went to the Rule Boston Camera Pub Night last week and Tim Mangini, Director of Broadcast at FRONTLINE, gave a presentation called "CRASH & BURN: Making docs on a tight turnaround," which was all about logistics and dealing with content for documentary film making.

One of the things he mentioned was that they deal with a lot of different acquisition formats, though their final output is 1080 60i.

But that wasn't what caught my attention.

Afterwards he was talking about working with a producer from England who had shot some material in 24p, and who had then had a lot of problems converting the material to 25p (for showing in Europe.) It was suggested that you're better off shooting in 30p and converting to 25p (or 24) than shooting in 24 and going to 25 (unless you conform rather than convert, and have the content play back at 25 frames per second instead of 24.)

And at the same meeting a friend said that he didn't like shooting in 24p because you couldn't do as much to convert it to slow motion as you could with 30p (or 60p!)


The 25/24 issue is a concern, as I do know I want to create a PAL DVD of the content (which would be 50i), and that's a certainty, whereas the 24p is more an aesthetic question.

Clearly I'm going to have to do some experiments to see what the results are when converting 24p to 50i and 30p to 50i.

Feel free to let me know I'm being delusional.

See also: 24p or 30p?




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