I disagree as well. You are just trading increased spatial resolution for decreased temporal resolution. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If you really want 30p, there are effective ways to convert 60i to 30p after the fact.

To paraphrase the post above, "Unless you have a specic reason to shoot otherwise, always shoot 60i."

John

Plus, 30p looks terrible when slowed down in post. At least on the project I'm working on right now.

IMO 60i looks terrible when slowed down as well. If you want slow motion you really need to overcrank.
There's a DV magazine article about the various different formats and I believe the survey showed that progressive material at the same resolution was perceived to be of a higher resolution than its interlaced cousin and was also perfered by the majority of viewers.
In a perfect world we'd all be using 60p and 60i would be a memory.

Here's my breakdown of 60i, 30p, and 24p:

How the motion looks:
60i has this weird motion look to it, which looks significantly different from 30p and 24p. Some people describe the look as "soap opera"-ey.

To see for yourself, take 60i footage and convert it to 24p in Sony Vegas 6 (not 5) and view on a CRT-based TV (NOT a computer monitor; this is really important).

You need high-motion footage to really see the difference... i.e. fast pans, (poorly-shot) handheld, zooming.

The difference between 24p and 30p is subtle.

24p has this stuttery/sticky/jumpy motion to it on fast pans and zooms. Haven't comapred it to 30p yet.

Temporal resolution / slow-mo:
60i is definitely the best, hands-down. You just have to slow things down right... i.e. map each field to its own frame if doing 50% slow downs (don't do frame blending if its exactly 50%). For 40%, do 60i-->24p @ 40% speed.

Perceived resolution (at normal speed, not slow motion):
Don't know. That DV article suggests 30p looks like it has more resolution than 60i. Some of this depends on the camera though, as many 60i cameras do this field blending thing. The DVX100 shooting at 60i can be set not to do it.

Film transfer
30p should be the worst.
Probably the best quality film transfer would be had from the PAL format shooting progressive 25p, then 24p NTSC, 60i NTSC, 30p NTSC.
Do your research beforehand for this, don't listen to what I say here. A film transfer would cost thousands of dollars.

Ease of post production
It's probably 30p, then 60i, then 24p.

24p can render the fastest in some cases, unless you need to remove and add pulldown while previewing.

Vegas is very good about handling these framerates, unlike some other programs. With Vegas, it doesn't make a big difference what you shoot.
Sometimes you want to apply an effect to each individual field instead of a frame when working with 60i footage (i.e. guassian blur).
Some video encoders will default to assuming your footage is progressive (i.e. Quicktime, some MPEG2 encoders).

You should set project properties to what your footage is.

Here's how I de-interlace your 60i footage with Vegas:

http://michael-morlan.net/pages/learning/learning_video_deinterlacing.htm

Michael

I feel really spoilt videoing in PAL. G

Michael:
You can get better 60i-->30p conversions with Mike Crash's smart de-interlace filter.

It detects motion, and only de-interlaces motion areas.

http://mikecrash.wz.cz/

To use it:
Set project properties to PROGRESSIVE, and set deinterlace method to NONE (you want to use Mike crash's filter instead of Vegas).

What settings do you use inside of Mike's Smart Deinterlace filter? Field differencing? Frame differencing? Both? Does it help with both 60i>24p and 60i>30p conversions? I have used his other filters and they are great. Any info on how to use this filter best would be appreciated.

30P looks great in slow mo with a little motion blurr and supersample.

Try it...And will surprize you in render time.

Another benefit is that still images look much better. For me I usually put a few pic from the wedding video on the dvd case. My pics before would have jagged interleave lines on anything moving.

"In a perfect world we'd all be using 60p and 60i would be a memory. "

Did you know that the HD100 has a 480p mode that records 60p...

No, I didn't, but that is definitely a move in the right direction. I believe I read here that Sony is endorcing 1080i right now b/c they will be moving to 1080p soon. Hopefully when that happens, and other companies do the same, the abomination that is interlacing will be put to bed.
Then the only annoying relic of early tv will be the whole 29.97 thing. Wouldn't it be nice to work with whole numbers?

You can get rid of the jaggies with photoshops video de-interlace filter. However for really good stills I've had great results coming off HDV shot at 50i, trick is to find a frame with the least motion. Probably even better results could be had using smart de-interlacing but I just ditched one field and interpolated.
Bob.