Footage Quality

[starixiom]

I am starting to film original footage with my Optura Pi. It has a progressive mode feature that shots at 30p. I was wondering in general if it is better to shoot interlaced footage when creating footage due to the fast moving nature of switching and fading from different sources? Or would it be better to shot in 30 progressive for performances, due to the quality of pulling stills and adding effects, in making loops, when i go to edit the footage? Another option under consideration would be to shoot in progressive but convert the footage to interlanced.

I am confused as to how the projector will display interlaced and non-interlaced footage? I plan on using DVDs and a miniDV deck connected to a mixer. NTSC.


Thanks.

[holly]

Always shoot in frame mode (progressive scan). I have a GL1 and even though I suspect there is a slightly better resolution in interlaced, I honestly cannot tell the difference. But when it comes to stills, compositing, fx, resizing, rotating, time reverse, slo-mo, bluescreen..., basically ANYTHING you end up doing on a computer, you will see an instant difference between how clean and easy the progressive mode is to work with verses trying to get decent results from an interlaced source. Don't even think about it. Leave the cam in progressive mode and never change it.

The video signal itself will still be interlaced (even if played on a beamer that can handle a progressive signal), that's just the nature of ntsc/pal. But you will not see any interlace artifacts (i.e: combing, vibrating stills, etc) because each frame is one half of a whole picture, rather than two halves of two different pictures woven together.

[frank]

Hi Starixiom,

it depends on your motives you want to shoot. In progressive mode your cam check the chip line for line. With interlaced mode every second line. The big difference is that in prog mode you have only 30 scans/second and in interlaced 60 (halfscans/sec). So if you take some fast moving motives liks cars the video will be sort of non-fluid (sorry, i miss the engl.word) in prog mode. its better to shoot in interlaced mode.
But if you want to slow the video or grab one frame its better to shoot in prog mode with fast exposure like 1/500 s. that gives you sharp images.

In general you can say if you want to show on computer/monitor prog mode and for tv/videorec interlaced.
You can interpret in most Postprod-programms your footage and say its interlaced or progressive, thats eliminate the stripes of interlaced movies after some filters.

If you are not sure, shoot your footage in progressive mode like holly said.

Ciao Frank