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Question about changing 60fps into 24.

H

harmonica44

I have been having trouble shooting a scene, cause of not enough light. I can't get more lights on my budget right now, other than the four hardware lights I have. I tried using a 1.4 lens but it will take a lot of practice to use to keep in focus before I can shoot a scene competently with it. I met someone who was willing to lend me her cam, for the remaining dark scenes in my short film. It looks great under low light, but she says it might shoot at 60 fps only. How good does it look if I were to remove 48 out of 60 frames, from those camera shots, to match the remaining 24 fps of my short?

I was told some filmmakers have been doing this and some argue not to. I just don't want to shoot it at 60 and have it be too late after if it's bad. She also says it might have a 30 fps option and will only have to remove 6.
 
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That would be a weird camera that only shoots 60 fps. Perhaps 30 as most consumer camcorders. However, if you're not getting enough light from a DSLR, a consumer video camera will be far worse.
 
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She probably means 60i not 60p. 60 frames interlaced is really 60 fields, or Half frames. Since it's half frames, it's more like 30fps, or most likely since you're in North America it's NTSC drop frame 29.97 fps.

Don't worry about it this project man. They probably won't match perfect but that's on here. Use what you need to shoot and your next project, which better be 60 seconds long and only feature one actor, you can focus on a little more detail.
 
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Okay thanks. I have one scene left to shoot on this one, but it keeps getting delayed cause I need to find a couple of replacement actors. In the mean time, I think I will see about practicing with more lights at night and see if I can get it right.
 
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Looks like the T2i supports the following video settings:

1920x1080 30fps
1920x1080 24fps
1280x720 60fps
640x480 60fps

It supports 24fps shooting so I don't see any problems.
 
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Well yeah my T2i does. It's just that it doesn't do as well in low light, so I thought about using my friends 30fps camcorder for low light, then removing 6 of the frames, each second, to match the other 24fps seconds of the movie, if that makes sense.
 
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There's no smooth way to go from 30fps to 24fps via frame-dropping. It will look horrible no matter what you do. You're better off using your T2i and NeatVideo for grain reduction if you have no way of increasing your light level.

(60fps -> 24fps is a little smoother, but will still look awfully weird.)

What camera does your friend have? The T2i should be able to handle low light conditions much better than a standard camcorder.
 
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Oh okay thanks. A guy I met who is also making movies says a lot of newcomers are doing that. I don't know the name of that cam that she has, and I'm waiting to here back from her, on which it is.
 
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harmonica44 said:
Oh okay thanks. A guy I met who is also making movies says a lot of newcomers are doing that. I don't know the name of that cam that she has, and I'm waiting to here back from her, on which it is.
Click to expand...

I'm betting there's a very good chance that your T2i will absolutely destroy her camcorder in the low-light performance arena. Keep in mind that a T2i with a decent lens is going to rival the quality of video cameras that are much more expensive. Before the recent introduction of the C300 and Scarlet-X you'd have to get a $20,000 video camera to get better image quality.
 
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Also, if you need to minimize grain on the T2i, use an ISO setting that is a multiple of 160. I can dig up the technical reasons if you like (the trade-off is your highlights will clip 1/3rd of a stop sooner, but I doubt you'll even notice that in your footage), but in most scenarios, an ISO multiple of 160 will have noticablely less noise than the nearest lower 100-multiple (eg. 160 is cleaner than 100, 320 is cleaner than 200, etc...).

The noisiest ISO settings are the ones that are 1/3rd of a stop lower than the 160-multiples: ISO 125 is worse than both ISO 100 and ISO 160, etc.
 
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