The extra resolution is enough to hide the edge blur and compositing artifacts. This is a test composite.
24p
The thing that first attracted me to the HF10 was the promise of 24 frame per second recording, which provides the softer, dreamy, motion blur characteristics of film.
I soon found that the camera would, in fact, record in 24 frame per second full HD 1920x1080 video. However, unlike more expensive cameras, the video is stored in an interlaced 60i format with pull-down. No need to go into detail here about 24 fps recording methods. But the bottom line is that there are three approaches to storing 24 fps video. First, a camera can store the actual 24 progressive frames, and nothing else – which is called “24p Native” mode and is not available on the HF10. Second, a camera can repeat some frames, called “24p Advanced” mode. The repeated frames help “top up” the 24 frames to 30 frames per second, and then the extra repeated frames are easily detected and removed in post. The HF10 does not support advanced mode either. The third technique is called “24p Normal” mode, and that’s what the HF10 uses.
Normal 24p has the following benefits: 1) It can be intercut with 30p or 60i video, 2) It has the 24p “look” but it plays smoothly on 30p or 60i video. But 24p Normal can be REALLY HARD to extract the additional information used to top up the 24 frames to 30. If you want to get back to the original 24 frames, and drop out the digitally created extra fields, it can be a real complicated problem.
Perhaps worse, I learned through attempting repeatedly for several weeks to extract the original 24 frames that AVCHD is a time-compressed codec. And most programs that are able to perform Reverse Telecine will not work properly with temporal compressed codecs. That means the tools inside Adobe Premiere and the tools in Final Cut Cinema Tools are useless. Through great effort I discovered that only After Effects and Apple Compressor (to my knowledge) have the ability to remove the extra information from the HF10’s footage and produce a true 24p Native file.
(If you're interested in checking out some of the footage from the HF10 and seeing my complete walkthrough to this problem, I created an article in this issue that outlines the technique I finally developed for converting AVCHD HF10 24p Normal footage to DVCPROHD 720p 24p Native footage. Once you have created a “preset” in Compressor, it’s a simple matter to batch convert footage shot on the HF10 to 24p for filmmaking. I also mention some ways to accomplish this in After Effects, which should be helpful to PC people, as well. To read this article, download clips from the HF10 to see if it works with your workflow, and post comments, just go to the article, The HF10 Workflow.)
AVCHD
AVCHD is a highly compressed video encoding technology. Playing back the AVCHD footage is not difficult, but converting it to an editable format and reversing the high compression is both CPU-intensive and Disk-intensive. The AVCHD file, once captured by Final Cut through it’s “Log and Transfer” utility, results in an Apple Pro Res 422 HQ MOV file that is ten times the size of the AVCHD original. So if you shoot for an hour at 1920x1080 and fill up an 8GB SDHC card, on import, you will end up with 80 GB worth of MOV file.
If you are accustomed to 720p24p editing, this will seem to be about 60 percent too much storage. Part of this is due to the much larger 1920x1080 resolution. Part of this is due to the extra pull-down frames that have to be removed. Using my Compressor preset, I was able to convert the MOV file to DVCPROHD 720p24 Native format, which had the same size as if it had been shot on the HVX and imported into Final Cut.
So there is an extra step after capture, of reverse telecine and reduction in resolution required. You will need Final Cut, the latest version of Compressor, and a fairly powerful Mac for a practical workflow. I used an older Intel Macbook Pro with no problem. It took my system about 40 minutes to “log and transfer” the AVCHD to MOV format. Then it took about another hour to convert the ProRes MOV to DVCPROHD and reverse the telecine.
This is much better than AVCHD files from other cameras, that took 40 minutes to render out 4 seconds of video.
