1080/24p (23.98sF)?

james smyth · April 4, 2007

I'm looking for an HD telecine, and one place says they output to 10-bit uncompressed 1080/24p (23.98sF). What does that really mean? When I see 1080/24p, I think 1080i w/ 3:2 pulldown. Is that what this is? Or is this honest-to-God 24p, as in 24 progressive frames a second? That would certainly cut down on drive space waste.

Also, by uncompressed, do they really mean uncompressed? Or merely lossless?

The place I'm looking at now is Bonolabs. It seems for a one-light transfer for 15 minutes of 16mm will cost me US$288.65 total. In case anyone was curious.

David Mullen ASC · April 4, 2007

1080/24PsF or (more commonly) 1080/23.98PsF is different than 1080/60i or (more commonly) 1080/59.94i.

24PsF means 24P stored on tape as two fields (PsF = progressive segmented frames) that are recombined during playback into P frames. There is no pulldown added. PsF was a Sony invention when they made the first 24P cameras, so they only had to change the Hz rate of the cameras (and the CRT monitoring) from 60 to 48 for recording/playback.

If you converted a 1080/23.98PsF master to a 1080/59.94i master, you'd be adding standard pulldown.

Typically film material shot at 24 fps is mastered to HD for home video at 1080/23.98PsF, usually to 10-bit 4:2:2 HD-D5, although now sometimes HDCAM-SR.

If it ends up being broadcast 1080/59.94i, then they would just make a conversion from the 23.98PsF master to 59.94i by adding pulldown.

Blame NTSC for the whole 59.94i standard here in the U.S.

Brian Dzyak · April 4, 2007

Blame NTSC for the whole 59.94i standard here in the U.S.

And for that, blame the conversion from black and white! :D We should just scrap everything and start over from scratch. And while we're at it, can we get the world on one power standard too?

james smyth · April 4, 2007

http://www.cinematography.net/digitk/digitk.htm

When looking for info on Bono, I came across this, and I must say, it looks pretty scary. I've seen someone post here once before that they had a green tint on the left side of their frame when using Bono, and you can see it here. The images seem way too blurry to be usable. There's no date on the article (unless it really was posted just today), I'm hoping it's old when the process was new and they've worked out this mess.

David Mullen ASC · April 4, 2007

Just call up Bono and ask if they are still using the Cineglyph or if they've switched to a Spirit or some other scanner, or if using a Spirit is an option.

You'll have to ask them about the actual data rates & formats they are talking about: 4:4:4 10-bit uncompressed 1920 x 1080? 4:2:2 10-bit uncompressed? Log or Lin? There's a difference between color-subsampling and compression, but some people mix the terms up. 4:4:4 10-bit 1080P uncompressed is pretty high in terms of data, I don't remember the figure... I know that the HDCAM-SR format can do 880 Mb/sec, which is mildly compressed 10-bit 4:4:4 1080P.