I know there has been lots of speculation about CineFrame 30 and how it may employ a "smart" de-interlacer that would only cause resolution loss in areas of motion, and no resolution loss in static areas.
Unfortunately, it isn't so. I've extracted the resolution sections from a CamAlign chart, shot both in 60i and CF30. The CF30 shows substantial resolution loss, and this is coming off a completely locked-down still shot. Looks like there's no smart de-interlacing going on.
Interestingly, Steve Mullen had hypothesized that due to row-pair summation and low-pass filters, the FX1 should deliver an "effective" 820 lines of resolution, and that seems to have been a pretty darn good guess. In this chart I'd say that it cleanly resolves at 700, and things get a little blurred together at about 750, so for a guess of 820 that's *very* close.
In interlaced mode the 1080i of the HDV delivers about 750 lines of resolution. In CF30 mode it drops to about maybe 575. Which is close enough to say that CF30 is pretty much a straight frame-drop de-interlace.
For the pictures, one is a 300% blow-up in Photoshop that demonstrates the convergence of lines on the resolution portion of the chart.
[img]
http://www.icexpo.com/FX1-60i-vs-CF30-res.jpg[/img]
For those who want to examine the raw extraction from the camera, here's a bitmap extraction of the uncompressed frames from the .m2t (no CineForm intermediary codec):
[img]
http://www.icexpo.com/FX1-60i-vs-CF30.BMP[/img]
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