1080p/30fps or 720/60fps for kite videos?

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[lasapcheong]

Hi

I have a Kodak Zi8 which is my primary HD video cam for taking kite videos. Which mode do you guys think is more suitable for taking kite videos? 1080p/30fps gives a higher resolution at lower fps and conversely 720/60fps would be the opposite. Seems to me 720/60fps might be a better idea to capture fast moving objects such as kites.

I may need to do a lot of zooming in when taking the videos but sadly this cam only comes with a sucky digital zoom, not an optical one.

Eventually they wil be going into YouTube so I'm not too sure if this matters as well and if it makes any noticeable difference.

Thanks
Darryl

[mikenchico]

Shoot at the lower resolution if you are using them on the web/youtube. Unless you are planning to use them on a high end, high def tv what is the use of shooting at a resolution you will never experience?

And let me tell you unless you have a quad core computer with a high end video card and 4 gig of ram you will not play or edit them satisfactorily on that either. I can barely view a 1080p .mov on my dual core 2ghz with 2 meg ram, my single core 1.5 ghz couldn't touch them, you see the first frame then audio only, might see another frame every 10 seconds or so.

If you plan to use them on a 1080p TV do you have a Blue Ray burner? If not you'll be burning at DVD quality which is  lower still then your next probable lower option of 720i at 30 fps

After saying all that though I'll contradict it in a way ... I always shoot stills at my highest resolution and lowest compression even though I'll never make a poster size blowup of any of my pictures. But then my computers can handle 5 meg stills just fine for editing, and it is nice to have that amount of detail and sharpness to start with.

[fidelio]

... with 2 meg ram.

well there's your problem.

seriously though, if you have the extra hard drive space, shoot 1080. you can always cut it down later if you like. and as for it ending up on youtube, youtube now streams 1080p videos. the number of ways people have to view youtube vids on their hdtv's is growing every day as well.

as for the editing question, you edit using a preview, and render the video in full resolution at the end, so it's not like you're trying to render the full hd image as you're making changes. granted the rendering takes some time, but you don't have to tend it. my particular machine renders 720p video at about 1/4 speed, so 1 minute of video would take 4 minutes to render. it's a 2.4ghz dual core/2gb ram system which is several years old.

ok, so i may not be typical, but i sometimes watch kite videos i've downloaded streamed over my network to my hdtv, and the more pixels the better in my book.

personally, i'd rather have the higher resolution than the higher frame rate. if you were talking 15 vs 30fps i'd rather have the fps, but since you're talking 30 vs 60, i'd rather have the resolution.

[RobB]

Hey there...
I have the same option with my new video camera, and I haven't gotten a chance to try the higher frame rate. I thought the same thing, though, that 60 fps is going to capture smoother motion. I'm all ready happy with the 30fps vs. my old video camera. I had a JVC hard drive video camera that took mediocre video of things that didn't move very fast. The kite was just a blur with that camera.
I would say to experiment with both settings, and see what you like better. By the time the video gets crunched by utoob, the video that you see in it's original format is going to be much different than someone downloading it over the internet. I like Vimeo, because they allow a user to download the original video. Utoob offers a download, sometimes, but the original video file is altered.
When I first started messing with computerized video editing, I was running on a dual PII with 512meg ram. It would take HOURS to render a 5 minute video.
If you're interested in seeing results from a new camera that's similar to yours, my utoob user name is the same as my username here...
~Rob.
http://www.youtube.com/user/must86

[mikenchico]

... with 2 meg ram.

well there's your problem.

oops ... dating myself, used to be that was a lot of memory, I have trouble sometimes with that gig/meg thing, gigabytes was unfathomable not too many years ago 

[fidelio]

and now we're into pennies per gigabyte and terabyte totals. was looking at laptops the other day and just had to pause and revel how far we've come for a second cause i saw a 2ghz quad core machine with 4gb ram, and a terabyte hd, for less than a thousand bucks, in a LAPTOP, crazy.

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