30p... or not?

Hi there, a few questions (in bold)-
After reading several threads on the fact that 30p seems to look nicer than 60i, I noticed that my AVCHD camcorder seems to be able to shoot in 60i or 30p. When reading [this link|http://www.amazon.com/Canon-VIXIA-AVCHD-Camcorder-Optical/dp/B001DTXK8G] from Amazon, I saw the following:
+"30p Progressive mode is a progressive format that is the perfect frame rate for the web because it delivers clarity for fast-action subjects. Plus, it is ideal for displaying crisp images on your home theatre system or computer monitor. Before now 30p was exclusively featured on pro-level camcorders but Canon now offers the widest frame rate options for every videographer. *(Note: Records in 60i onto memory card.)"*+
I was a little confused. The camcorder can record either onto its internal hard-drive or to a SD memory card. *Does anyone know whether the words in bold mean it records in 60i only onto SD cards, or also to the hard-drive? If it is onto both, how can they call it 30p if it is really 60i?*
Second question:
I was under the impression from reading another thread that FCE doesn't work with 30fps content. However, *am I right that 30p is 30fps, unlike 60i that is 29.97? If so, will FCE work with this footage?*
P.S. I got the info about 30p being 30fps from Wikipedia, where it says:
+"30p, or 30-frame progressive, is a noninterlaced format and produces video at 30 frames per second"+
Message was edited by: skalicki`

As far as the frame rates go, the original US spec, RS-170 was 30 Hz. When they added color, and color sub-carrier, they added the approx. 29.97Hz, because they added color subcarrier to NTSC, and needed to harmonize with it's 3.58MHz frequency, to avoid phase errors. The CRT TV's were simplier to implement reasonably that way, given the state of technologies those days, phosphors, etc. They couldn't make fast deflection system cost effectively, and due to phosphor fading, they'd have flicker in progressive mode. The motion is slightly more jerky at 30Hz frame refresh rate than at 60Hz field rate(even though movies project at 24 (due to even bigger technology limitation of those days - many people actually like it), so they came up with interlaced scheme, which dealt cost effectively with the motion, deflection circuits (tubes and magnetics) and phosphor limitations of those days. The NTSC spec is at: http://www.paradiso-design.net/videostandards_en.html. ATSC then added all those standards and aded hthe HD, because the technology to do great de-inerlacing and temporal shifts is easily built into the decoder IC's, and it has to convert everything into some fixed spatial resolution of the display panel or DLP chip anyway (CRT's are gone). The same goes for frame rates. TV's generally receive some 36 different formats off air and add something like 60p over HDMI, and convert any of that to something like 1920x1080x120p (or whatever the panel is) anyway. They have to deal with 9X16 and 3x4, stretching, non-linear stretching, clipping, pan&scanning, sizing, PIPs/split screens, fitering of the image, anyway, so what is an extra format between friends? So they handle 36+ time more than NTSC. The INPUT formats supported are described here: http://www.paradiso-design.net/videostandards_en.html.
PC's which were traditionally dealing with fixed pages of text or graphics, later added motionless JPEG and even later motion video, in general deal well with resolutions, scan rates and sizing, but not with de-interlacing, so because of that, legacy and bandwiths, they'd rather stay in progressive world. (Microsoft fought pretty hard for 720p).
Camcorders had other technology problems, mainly bandwidths, power consumption, tapes, they have to encode, decode, drive scaled down display, etc., so they are also bogged down by technology limitations and legacy. That led them to 1440 limitations, tapes, etc. They were also created at the time when Firewire was in. First, for the digital world, the DV was created - quite proprietary and quite incompatible at the beginning. Later on, when ATSC and HD came, they decided HDV based on MPEG 2. The main push for digital actually came from Hollywood, because of Digital Rights Management - copy protection. As serial copying didn't degrade quality, and as HD was basically impossible to copy protect in analog domain, the digial domain was the only way to go, and ultimately pushed into PC's as well.
The Canons support acqusition (on the sensor) and shifting out at either 60i (one field at a time each whole frame still 30 times/sec), or they acquire every 1/30th of a second (30Hz), and save as the second field of the original frame where the second field of 1/60th of a second delayed sample would go, so that the storage device gets 60-like structured and timed data. The benefits of the 30Hz rate is better (longer) exposure in low light as well as good compatibility with PC's that cannot handle de-intarlacing. The price is possibly jerkiness in very fast motion.
According to Canon's site, they do the 30Hz acquisition at 60i storage rates onto either storage media. The data can be re-composed as 30p because you can extremely simply "de-interlace" by arranging corresponding two fields into 1 frame each 1/30th of a sec.
The rates really do not finally matter because practically no display device (PC or TV) actually displays 30Hz or 24Hz vertical, they'd flicker like ****. That is why when panel has 120Hz refresh rate, that is all it has and it will convert all these 60i, 30P, 29.97p, 24p or whatever to what the fixed panel or DLP technology runs at. The one thing that TV will not generally handle, is 1440 horizontal pixels, that has to be re-sampled by the output device (unless it is analog signal, in which case the TV will digitize it at 1920/line). I hope this helps to understand it and that I didn't make it even more confusing. English is not my native language.
30p is 30 Frames/second (each line in sequence), 60i is 60 fields/second (each other line in sequence, odd and even alternating). Each 2 pair of fields can compose a frame, but if there is a motion, doing it simply create unpleasant horizontal distortion, which gets handled by de-interlacing algorithms, some well, some not so well.
The specs seem illogical, at one moment, but if you consider the technology limitation and progression, legacy issues and the fact that they had to agree on some standard, on "sampled bases", it makes sense.

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