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My first draft of this post quickly crossed 1,000 words as I tried to provide information about the reality of shooting and editing in 24p and other frame rates. It’s a subject that will take some work and maybe several posts to explore. I’ll spare you that now.
Here’s the bottom line from my perspective. As Stu said, people expect films to play at 24 fps. Video runs at 30 fps. Even if the audience couldn’t tell you why, most people would feel the differences between film and video.
My point is simple. The most obvious difference between film and video is not the frame rate!
The most obvious difference is ratio.
I had a program shot in SD that came to me for edit. It was a live presentation shot with two cameras – one on the presenter and one on the audience. When I looked at the footage I discovered that main camera had somehow been set to shoot a 16 x9 ratio. When I dropped the clips on the timeline there were black bars at the top and bottom.
I completed the edit then nested the entire timeline in a second timeline and applied a wide screen filter. The program now played as a 16 x 9 video with no letter-boxing.
When the client played the DVD at the premier several people mentioned how great it was that they had moved into high def. It wasn’t HD. It was SD with a 16 x9 ratio. Their perception was that all video with that ratio was HD.
In my post about the Indian wedding video “City of Lakes” I mentioned that they cropped the video much more horizontal than 16 x 9 so it feels even more like film. I would suggest that more people will view your film as shot on film when you crop to a ratio that looks like a feature film.
Here’s an image from this video in the original format and one cropped to 4 x 3 format.
Another obvious difference is that all films are graded (color corrected) and most video is not.
Most of my projects require grading to correct for differences in color between cameras. Sometimes the lighting needs improvement as well. I normally use Apple Color and get great results.
Then I had a project that I knew would benefit from a ‘film look’ approach to grading. Magic Bullet Mojo had just been released so I grabbed a copy, watched the tutorial and started playing around with the footage. In seconds the whole project started to look like a it had been shot on film. All the footage was from a Nikon D90 so it already had that 24p feel to it but grading for the film look made a huge difference.
Watch this tutorial on using Magic Bullet Mojo from Stu. You’ll see what I mean instantly.
Intro To Magic Bullet Mojo from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.
The third difference is transcoding from an interlaced video format to progressive.
Whether you plan to distribute on DVD, web or as film the sooner you get your footage into progressive format rather than interlaced the better. Yes, you can edit interlaced video in Final Cut Pro. Take your clips and transcode to progressive format and watch how much better it plays in real time, how many more effects are rendered correctly in real time.
All computers, flat screen monitors and LCD projectors run as progressive natively along with all Blu-Ray players and most regular DVD players. Interlaced video on these devices will show up with horizontal tearing lines when paused. The images below show an interlaced frame from a video and the same frame de-interlaced.
The differences between 30p and 24p are more subtle than the differences in ratio, grading and progressive footage. All that being said, I believe shooting, editing, and rendering at 24p makes sense for most project if you can. And with so many low cost DSLR cameras on the market this is now a choice anyone can – and should – make.
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I enjoy the laymans approach. Thank You