Barrister, when you said Cinema drive detects 24p source and renders it at 24p, did you by any chance mean that the TV plays back the 24p at it's original framerate instead of using pulldown techniques to make it conform to 60p?
Yes, 24p is displayed at 24p.
It can't be 60p (more accurately, 59.94p). Otherwise they will have to use pulldown, since 59.94 (29.97 x 2) divided by 24 will not give you a whole number that can allow proper conversion. 59.94 divided by 23.976 is 2.5, which is still not a whole number, and the ".5" is the half frame that requires pulldown.
Film is 24p. NTSC on flat panel TV is 60p (59.94p). When Sony says "Cinema Drive," it can't mean 60p of NTSC TV, otherwise the use of the word "cinema" will not make sense, and they should have called it "TV Drive" instead of "Cinema Drive."
That's why LG calls it Real Cinema; Panasonic, 24p Cinematic Playback; and Samsung, Cinema Smooth --- because the word "cinema" distinguishes 24p rendition from 60p rendition.
So, using Cinema Drive, does the TV play back the 24p at its original framerate? Yes.
Using Cinema Drive, does the TV use 2-3 pulldown and convert 24p to 60p? No. If it detects a 25fps PAL source, it will display at 50Hz, no pulldown; if it detects a 29.97fps NTSC source, it will display at 60Hz (59.94Hz), no pulldown; if it detects a 24p source, it will display at 24p (but not at 24Hz).
If it displays at 24p, does it mean that the TV shows only 24 frames per second? Definitely not. 24fps at 24Hz is unwatchable because it flickers too much. Older 24p-capable TVs refresh 24p at 48Hz by doubling each frame, but flicker is still obvious at 48Hz.
Newer TVs refresh 24p at 72Hz, to simulate the triple shutter on cinema projectors. But on higher-end TVs, the standard is now 24p at 96Hz, meaning each frame is refreshed 4 times (24 x 4 = 96).
Movie projectors cannot display 24fps of film as is. If they did, all you will see is an unwatchable blur. What they do is implement a double shutter that opens and closes twice for each frame of film, in order to be able to show each frame individually, instead of showing a series of overlapping frames continuously. Today's standard is a triple shutter per frame in order to minimize the flicker that is more obvious on double shutter projectors.
=======================================
The question you should ask is, "What type of scenes will demonstrate the difference between 24p-to-24p without pulldown vs. 24p-to-60p with telecine pulldown?" The answer is scenes with slow camera pans.
Example? The opening scene of
Hugo has a slow-panning scene that is very long. Beautifully cinematic cadence on 24p at 96Hz. It's going to have bad judder at 60p, but still ok for most people, since it's hardly noticeable to the average viewer anyway.
It's extremely jerky on YouTube's 30fps due to a bad implementation that looks like simple frame-dropping instead of a proper pulldown:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svDYdh77JkAAlso try
I, Robot, (time: 25:35 to 25:57; look at the robots) and the opening scene of
The Day After Tomorrow (00:53 to 02:55).
Note:
My examples are encoded not at true 24p, but at the standard 23.976p. Try a true 24p BD encode, and if you notice a dropped frame every 41seconds, then your Bravia cannot handle true 24p correctly.
They should have agreed on a single standard HD frame rate, since this 24p vs. 23.976p difference is confusing the industry, especially the media player makers.
They came up with 23.976 because 24fps of film x 1000 ÷ 1001 = 23.976. This factor of 1000 ÷ 1001 (a remnant of the NTSC factor of 30fps x 1000 ÷ 1001 = 29.97) should have been discarded when we shifted from analog TV to digital TV.
