panasonic hvx-200 25P over 1080i

[illia]

I'm about to shoot a movie (low budget of course) with the hvx-200, I've tested it's quality and I found it superbe, but by reading it's description there's something I don't understand. The ccd is supposed to have a natural resolution of 720 lines on progressive scan mode, or 1080 on interlaced, but there's the option of 25P over 1080i. I've asked on the shop where we are about to buy the camera and they didn't answer us. I'm pretty interested in knowing the real resolution of this camera and to know if the 25P over 1080i is a kind of trick Panasonic uses to increase the resolution artificially (do they blend two fields in a single one, and are those fields part of the same image or are they sepparated in time like a normal interlaced image?)

 

[David Mullen ASC]

The sensors themselves are progressive-scan but not 1920 x 1080 or even 1280 x 720 pixels, something a little less, 960 x 540, and then camera scales them up to whatever recording format you choose, 720P, 1080P, 1080i. Plus it uses a green CCD pixel-offset design to increase resolution.

So if you own the 50 Hz (PAL) version and shoot at 25P, then it can record this as 25P/720, 25P/1080, or 50i/1080 by storing the P frames split into interlaced-scan fields. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panasonic_AG-HVX200