Though consumer HD cameras are becoming more common, camcorder manufacturers have completely missed the boat as far as putting together a package that best fits the general consumer's needs.  You can get a cheap camera now that will shoot 16:9 1080i high-def, and that's great, except if you want to share your movies online.

If you want to shoot home movies and share them online with friends and family or if you are an aspiring vlogger, you want to be thinking about 30 frames-per-second progressive scan.  Even if you are an indie filmmaker drawn to 24p prosumer cameras -- if you've also had a desire to publish your film online, then there are compelling reasons to consider 30p.

I'll go so far as to say that if given the choice between a HD 30i and a standard def 30p camera, I'd get the 30p.  Sadly, no such choice exists for under $6000.

So why is 30p more important than HD?

Reason 1: Bandwidth pricing and download speed haven't caught up

That 1080i looks sweet on your TV, but unless you're Apple you can't afford to deliver that native resolution to the masses online.  And frankly, unless you have some superlatively kick ass home movies, nobody is going to wait to download them anyway.  Shooting in HD just isn't that important right now unless you are broadcasting a football game.  It's completely irrelevant to the typical consumer's need to easily film, edit and share video.

Reason 2: Progressive scan looks better on a computer monitor

I took the liberty of taking a few screen shots from a recent Rocketboom episode to help illustrate some of the problems with interlaced video.  With interlaced video, each frame is composed of two frames, one that catches all the odd lines of the image and one that catches all the even lines.  The two fields are not captured at the same point in time, so when something moves across the field of view the odd field captures an image of the object in one place and the even field captures the object in a slightly different position.  The result is an ugly, striped mess, and it looks something like this robot crawling through an intestine:



"Sure," you say, "but I can just run my video through a deinterlace filter."  This is true.  There are some really professional deinterlacing packages that output a very nice looking frame composed of a blend of the two fields.  When things move you get sort of a motion blur or double exposure effect, but it's not too distracting.  One package called Cleaner does this fairly well, but it's expensive, time consuming and requires a lot of disk space for outputting the uncompressed video.  Most solutions use the simpler field drop method, where one field is discarded and the remaining one is duplicated in the other's place.  It's about as pleasant to look at as a jagged robot standing in front of a red zig zag:



Progressive scan, however, captures the whole frame at the same point in time, allowing you to appreciate the subtleties of Joanne Colan nodding in your direction without any nasty video ladder-effect, stair-stepping, or zig-zagging:



Reason 3: Progressive scan compresses better

Except for the blended-field deinterlaced video, progressive scan video tends to compress much better than interlaced or deinterlaced video.  Interlaced video will produce a compressed output that is blurry and rife with compression artifacts, as will deinterlaced video (though to a somewhat lesser degree).  Because of this, if you are using an interlaced source, you basically have the choice between crappy looking video, or a much larger file.  Usually you end up with a bit of both.

Reason 4: 30 frames per second gives you the most delivery options

If you are willing to spend a few grand, you can find a camera that will do 24p.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, 30p cameras just don't exist short of 6 grand, and I think it's just because nobody has realised that the feature can be sold to more than a very niche market.

The reason I recommend 30p instead of the more available 24p frame rate is that it gives you more options for delivering high quality video online.

When you have a 30 frame per second source, you can opt to encode it at a 1/2 or 1/3 the frame rate (15fps and 10fps, respectively) to deliver nice looking versions of your video at 1/2 and 1/3 the size.  15fps comes out looking quite respectable and is a good trade-off, allowing you to easily halve the file size without sacrificing image quality.

You can do this with a 24fps source as well, but the resultant 12fps starts looking a little choppy and more like the 1/3 version of the 30fps example.  At 1/3, the 8fps version starts getting difficult to watch because it's too low to capture subtle lip movement, causing speakers to look dubbed.

Of course, you can also choose to encode a 24fps file at 10 and 15fps, but because you aren't using a clean 1/x fraction, the video will have a bit of a stuttering effect since the frames will not all be equally spaced from eachother with respect to time.

Where are the cheap 30P camcorders?

Unless I'm horribly mistaken, the typical consumer wants to use their video camera to make movies that they can share with people.  From the current product landscape, it would seem that the electronics industry is conviced people will only be watching their videos on their own television sets, or they will be sharing video on recorded media such as dvds instead of over the network.  HD cameras are becoming readily available, but if you want a 30p capable device, you're unfortunately looking at 6-10 thousand.

If you're more interested in posting videos to the web for your friends to see, or if you are publishing your next short film online, your best current option is to run your 30i videos through a professional deinterlace filter before compressing, or spend a little extra money on a 24p camera.

For the affordable 30p model, though, you'll just have to wait.

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