Framerate question for foreign films and BEST quality

[Alex Pallas]

i've been encoding a lot of my dvds lately and got to wondering whether these Blu-Ray releases from overseas are as good as possible. Since the Chinese and European markets are shooting at 25p (Secam/PAL), shouldn't we be seeing 1080p25fps on some releases in the US from overseas? or are we? i'm mixed up :S

[UFAlien]

I may be wrong, but I believe PAL is just the home video/Television standard for SD. It's totally irrelevant in HD, and I believe the movies are shot at 24fps.

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by UFAlien

I may be wrong, but I believe PAL is just the home video/Television standard for SD. It's totally irrelevant in HD, and I believe the movies are shot at 24fps.

You're right that PAL is a standard definition format - really a TV standard rather than a DVD format though they call certain DVDs PAL too as they're encoded to run on PAL TVs (have the right frame rate, etc.).

1080i50 is a valid broadcast standard in Europe/UK. There are some 1080i50 Blu-ray discs but they're mainly not feature films. Feature films designed for cinema release, even if shot in Europe are usually shot at 24fps. There are a few European cinema feature films that have encoded at 1080i50 but this minority of discs would have been sped up by 4% from the original 24fps - when they should really have been encoded at 24fps.

Where you may not be getting the best quality is with European television shows, dramas, documentaries etc. European television shows, dramas and documentaries, sports too, are usually shot at 1080i50 or 25fps in Europe. So any European disc that isn't a feature film not at this rate probably won't be the best quality. But this is irrelavent for feature films intended for cinema release which are usually shot at 24fps.

Many US HDTVs aren't compatible with 1080i50 though (1080p25, like 1080p30 isn't a valid format in Blu-ray - if something was shot at 1080p25 rather than 1080i50 it would have to be encoded as 1080i50 and progressive frame encoding used or something like that). I've read that some US HDTVs are compatible but I can't remember which, and the US Samsung BDP1500 is said to be one player that's compatible.

The same people who make European HDTV sets (compatible with 50hz and 60hz, and often 24Hz) also make the US sets (compatible only with 60Hz and often 24Hz). So the companies in the US are actually disabling the 50hz functionality rather than not including it, when selling most US HDTVs.

[lobosrul]

Originally Posted by Alex Pallas

i've been encoding a lot of my dvds lately and got to wondering whether these Blu-Ray releases from overseas are as good as possible. Since the Chinese and European markets are shooting at 25p (Secam/PAL), shouldn't we be seeing 1080p25fps on some releases in the US from overseas? or are we? i'm mixed up :S

If whatever your encoding was meant for theatrical release then you need not worry, the source is 24p unless its a silent film, thats with very very few exceptions. However, I've seen some cheap import NTSC DVD's of movies that look like they were simply converted from a digital PAL source (that was itself sourced from film).

If its a TV show, then yes there will be a reduction of quality from the PAL DVD to NTSC DVD. To go from 50i to 60i, theres a pattern of blended fields inserted. The only Blu-ray TV show from outside the US I have ever seen is Planet Earth. And I think (I hope) they just slowed it down from 25p to 24p.

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by lobosrul

The only Blu-ray TV show from outside the US I have ever seen is Planet Earth. And I think (I hope) they just slowed it down from 25p to 24p.

I read that they shot some of it with film cameras at 25p and some of it with interlace HD cameras at 50i, ie. that the HD camera sections were recorded at 1440x1080@50i.

But according to this post by Penton-Man:
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...postcount=6166
they shot a lot of it using a Varicam - that, even though it could be set to 50hz would actually record internally at 720/60P - I don't know how that works - if it gives bad effects - and if it does why didn't they use HD video cameras that are native 50hz or 25hz models or aren't there any

And if it started life at 720/60p I wonder why they didn't also put it on disc like that, or at least one version of it, since, if that was the internal frame rate and resolution of the video footage, couldn't that have given the best quality? It could be they wanted it to have the 'film-effect' (ie. 24/25fps look) and to be able to say it is "full HD" - but that would mean upscaling instead of it being the original res as well as frame rate converting it to 24p.

[Alex Pallas]

thanks for the replies. like i said i thought about this when i was encoding a bunch of chinese dvds into mkv's, many of which are PAL and thus bear the 25fps encoding. i went to the google and it says secam is 25fps, so i assumed that meant the films were shot at that fps and my curiosity carried over to blu-ray releases :S