Movie Formats

Flyer12 — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:59:36 GMT

Can somebody please provide me a quick guide to the advtanages and disadvantages of the varoius Movie formats vavailable eg AVCHD PS,FX,FH & HQ. I appreciate they are different levels of HD quality but I'd appreciate a bit more imformation relating to the differences when played back on a high def TV or recorded on to a DVD. The description in the Sony manuals is very brief .

Movie Formats

Mick2011 — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 07:58:10 GMT

Hi Flyer12, welcome to the Sony Forums

The answer is best understood by trying the various quality levels for yourself.

As you infer, it's quite obvious which is the best quality – the higher the resolution (the number of pixels recorded per frame) the better the image quality, but you'll only really appreciate that on a large screen, or reproduced fullscreen on a device with that display resolution. So 1920x1080 pixels will look great on an HDTV, but be kind of overkill played back on a smartphone.

Similarly, the frame rate (expressed as 50p, 25p, 50i, etc) will affect the 'smoothness' of the video, especially when panning, or shooting fast-moving subjects. It's also more flexible to work with high-bitrate movies when editing, especially for things like slow-motion.

These are the typical resolution and framrate specs for the settings you mentioned:

PS: 28M 1920x1080 (50p)

FX: 24M 1920x1080 (50i)

FH: 17M 1920x1080 (50i)

HQ: 9M 1440x1080 (50i)

As you can see, the better the quality, the higher the bit rate (28M, 24M, etc refers to Megabits per second) so you will obviously fill up a memory card much faster in PS than you would in HQ.

This is why I suggest you decide for youself if you need to shoot in PS the whole time by viewing the results on the device(s) you normally use and doing a comparison at different recording levels. I have to say, it's often surprising how good FH looks, compared to PS playback, and HQ played back on something like a tablet can look remarkably good.

Hope that's of some help.

Cheers

Mick

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