Many newbie questions about movie making (fps, resolutions and i in the Vimeo Technical Help Forum

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Petr Tomicek 9 days ago

Hi everyone,

First of all I'd like to say how great I think this Vimeo community is and videos that it created. They are so good it inspired me to move from documenting things I do in life from photography to video.

What I have now is the latest Macbook Pro so I assume I will be doing all the editing on it. The camera I am going to buy is the HV30, which seems to be same as HV20, which seems to be very popular here because of its image and price. The software I will be using is going to be Final Cut Express, as it's more professional than iMovie, but not as expensive as Final Cut Pro (I'm a university student so I can't afford professional software and hardware)

So here comes my understanding of things and the questions:

1) There are many formats and frame rates in which the HV30 can record. From what I understand HV30 can record up to 1080i at 60fps. Does interlaced mean that ever other line in a frame is skipped so each frame has 540 vertical lines? And when deinterlaced it combines two frames to achieve the full 1080 vertical lines and therefore dropping the frame rate to half? Also, do you deinterlace before editing or when you export the final product?

2) After the final movie is made there are three things I'd like to do with it: put it online here, put it on a DVD and finally put it on Blu Ray in HD. Here is when frame rates confuse me. Dvd format is at 25fps, the preffered Blu Ray Format is 24p and video here on Vimeo are also at 24fps. If I shoot at 1080i at 60fps, what effect will it have when converted to dvd resolution and framerate (if even possible)? Also, I know that Final Cut Express does not support 24p, but I looked on some tutorials (Euginia's ones especially) and found out there are workarounds for this without (hopefully) loosing any quality.

The question here really is: Can I go and shoot at 1080i at 60fps and use the footage for all of these uses or will I have to shoot at different frame rates knowing for which media I am shooting? This really confuses me as I want to make travel movie and you can't really shoot everything twice at different frame rates.

I guess that is all for now. Thank you all in advance for your answers.

Petr
Eugenia Loli-Queru 9 days ago

Before I answer your questions: where do you live? Europe or US/Canada? You see, you talk about 25p, and then you talk about 60i. I need to know if your camera is NTSC or PAL.
Petr Tomicek 9 days ago

I live Europe so PAL.
Eugenia Loli-Queru 9 days ago

1. Something like that.

2. You can't record at 60i with your PAL HV20 camera. You can only do 25p and 50i. No 60i, 30p or 24p. These frame rates are reserved for the NTSC cameras only.

So, what you do is this:
a. You record at 50i.
b. You edit at 50i, interlaced -- depends on the editor of course as FCE actually de-interlaces automatically during editing I believe.
c. Export with your editor's exporting feature for DVD.
d. Export using the available Quicktime tutorials for Vimeo.
e. For Blu-Ray it's only 50i, no 25p support. Use this if your DVD authoring application can't burn Blu-Rays:
eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/02/23/create-blu-ray-video-in-plain-dvds-for-free/
You will need a PC for this tutorial. You will need FCS for BD burning on the Mac.
Petr Tomicek 8 days ago

Thank you Eugenia, it is much more clearer now. As for the need of PC, I run Vista 64-bit in Mac OS through virtualization, so I shouldn't have any problems using the tutorials you linked. Once again thank you.
Karl Faxnas 5 days ago

I am a newbe, and the first time I visit this forum. Maybe this is the right tread for my problem.

I have in Blender made my first domino-animation. (not so bad) but I dont know anything abouth how to get this animation into video, maybe you can advice me.
I running a iMac Leopard and Quick - Time - Pro, iMovie, VLC. I live in Sweden.
I provide two links to look at.

< http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg42/OnyX_034/Bild3-3.png >

< http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg42/OnyX_034/Bild2-5.png >

Thanks for helping me.
Eugenia Loli-Queru 5 days ago

You can edit this animation and export with Blender. I have written a tutorial here: eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/04/20/video-editing-with-blender/
You simply switch to the video editing module of Blender, and then you import the "scene" to the timeline.
Karl Faxnas 5 days ago

Very good tutorial. it vill be easy to learn from.

You mention in your tutorial I need go to Gimp to get transparent text. Yes, I have been using Gimp so I know wath you say, but why, can not Blender provide transparant text.

Yhank you for helping
Eugenia Loli-Queru 5 days ago

You misunderstood. The tutorial I wrote is for people who don't want to mess or learn the 3D part of Blender, but only use it as a video editor. I thought I made that clear.

As it happens, YOU, are a Blender 3D user, not a video editor user. So YOU, don't need to use Gimp. You can do everything in Blender 3D, and then import everything in to the VSE module of Blender. You have the upper hand.