Friday, November 23, 2007

What frame rate for the next production?

We just bought an HD television.

Although filmmakers are scrambling to create HD content, the infrastructure to distribute and view that content is not at all firm. So, the filmmaker is faced with a difficult choice--what frame rate and format to shoot?

For a filmmaker, the safest bet seems to be to either shoot 1080 60i--1080 lines, 60 frames interlaced, or 1080 24p--1080 lines, 24 frame progressive. (In PAL land, the two options would be 1080 50i and 1080 24p.)

Maybe the best thing to do is to shoot 2-3 minutes of test footage at both frame rates. Then convert both samples to three final products: broadcast, film, and DVD.

I'll probably run this test before I shoot my next project, and choose the project's frame rate depending on how the conversion process goes, and what the final product look like.

1 comment:

smplcv said...

With HD, the digital media had a drastic change..nice article..thanks for sharing this with me!.


Media CV