Movie Formats

[Flyer12]

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 .

[Mick2011]

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