Camcorders Ratings Reviews
What does p mean in a camcorder rating?
When sites are reviewing camcorders and video camera’s they’ll often say things like, “cinematic 24P imagery.” In such ratings what does P stand for?
In that particular measurement, the 24 means 24 frames per second and the “p” means “progressive”. A “progressive frame” means the whole frame is captured at once.
Turn back time a bit…
A LONG time ago, it was discovered that the ideal frame rate to capture and playback FILM images for most “normal” renderring is 24 frames per second. It is smooth enough that the human eye sees smooth motion, but fast enough to not induce certain types of flicker making it uncomfortable to watch. Film cameras capture at full frames at a time.
Move forward through time.
Television appears. The way television signals are sent and used, in order to make the video signal look as it looks when displayed on a cathode ray tube, the gun in the tube shoots/scans out alternating lines of video information and the alternating lines of information are interlaced – this all happens very quickly – sometimes referred to as the refresh rate – how quickly these alternating lines of information are refreshed in a given amount of time. Sometime referred to in Hertz (Hz). Ultimately, what the eye sees is the image on the TV…
Forward in time a little further…
Camcorders appear and because their target playback is typically in TVs, they are designed to work well in that environment. Camcorder capture rate and playback rate is matched with the TV CRT refresh rate and the interlaced frame capture method (the “i” you might see with certain other numbers). Typically, a vanilla standard definition camcorder captures at 30 frames per second… this is actually 29.97 frames per second, but wikipedia does a better job explaining that timing, so use that resource. These 30 frames are already interlaced – sometimes referred to as 60 frames per second – but only the alternating lines of the video signal…
Fast forward a bit more…
Meanwhile, big budget studios – and others – still use film which is still captured at 24fps and the “cinema look” becomes something camcorder users want – without having having to deal with film. The “video look” is not what is desired – and the camcorder manufacturers start down the path of making affordable 24p or similar visual quality video delivery. Meanwhile, computers and TVs start coming off the CRT platform so the interlacing match up is no longer as much of a requirement and there are all sorts of embedded converters that can deal with moving video from a source to a monitor without having consumers worry about the various refresh, conversion and display capabilities.
There can be challenges with editing non-30 fps video because of the way the video frames are interpreted by some lower-end video editors. There’s a thing called “pull-down” – another item better explained by wikipedia that low end editors just can’t deal with…
There’s a whole lot more about all this, but suffice it to say that there’s a move among some to not look like they used a digital camcorder – even though the used a digital camcorders, and the “holy grail” is native 24p with the least amount of video compression.
At the moment the least expensive camcorder that meets both those criteria – and has a mic jack and manual audio control – is the Canon HV40. Be very careful to not get sucked into the marketing hype from the various manufacturers… “cinematic 24P imagery” is NOT native 24p capability. There are a few other camcorders can do native 24p, but you really need a good supporting infrastructure (computer editing hardware and software) to support that. The free, bundled, software is generally not able to deal with it. The Panasonic AG-DVX100, AG- HVX200, Canon XL2, XH series, XLH series, most of the higher end Sony HVR series (and SDCAM/HDCAM/XDCAM series) and JVC GY series are there – pro grade… consumer cams, not so much.
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