choosing between 1080i and 1080p for recording and disc burning

1080p30 recording = quite juddery/un-smooth motion. Not as unsmooth motion as 24 fps but won't be as smooth as the others
1080/60i or 1080p60 recording = smooth motion.

If you wanted the most "classic film look" go for 1080p30 (of the 3, closest to 24 fps). For smooth, realistic motion, I'd go for either 1080/60i or 1080/60p.

1080/60i vs 1080/60p

I'd think the 1080/60p recording would be a higher bitrate (so would use more disc space). A 1080p60 recording, assuming the bitrate was high enough, should in theory be the best/most accurate. Does your software support 1080p60? You can get Blu-ray players that play 1080p60 files but 1080p60 is not part of the standard Blu-ray specs. But there's a possibility they might add it at some point in the future, but until then, if you didn't have a player that could play 1080p60 files or you wanted to create it as a standard Blu-ray, you'd have to down-convert it eg. to 1080/60i (or 720p60). Would it be worse quality going from the 1080p60 recorded by the camera to 1080/60i than by recording in 1080/60i in the first place? One thing is that progressive footage, like 1080p60 should be better (not in terms of performance) to work with (eg. if you were adding certain effects to it) . I think the best thing is to try each, and see which you think is best. But lets say the camera's 1080p60 converted to 1080/60i looked no worse than from the cameras 1080/60i option, I'd go for 1080p60 recording, even if you were, for now, going to encode it as 1080/60i, since you could have a higher quality version in 1080p60 for when either the standard specs change or for playing in a 1080p60 capable player or a PC etc.
Edited by Joe Bloggs - 1/22/13 at 4:58am

Yes, all Blu-ray players support 1080/60i as part of the standard Blu-ray specs. Some also support playing 1080p60 AVCHD video files (though 1080p60 isn't part of the standard Blu-ray specs). Yes, you'd end up with 60 fields per second instead of 60 frames per second and it would have with half the lines. How much visible quality loss there was it would depend. There isn't a 30i so I assume you mean 60i (60 interlaced fields per second). 60i should be able to store 30p footage. In theory, the only quality loss should be from recompression. You shouldn't be dropping any lines. If it really is recording 30 progressive frames per second, I don't see why, on import, you tell it to interpret it as interlaced footage. Wouldn't you only tell it to interpret it as interlaced if it was recorded as interlaced? You mean watching the finished encode? Recompressing the video could reduce the quality from the original.
Edited by Joe Bloggs - 1/22/13 at 11:44am

It's not as complicated as you make it. AVC is H.264 so there should be no conversion. AVCHD is how it's authored, not a different file encoding format.

30p is equivalent to 60i if done properly, just as 25p to 50i in 50Hz "PAL" countries. Splitting a frame into two fields is straight forward, of course you lose half the lines in each split field but you lose nothing.

What's best depends on your needs, the nature of the footage (fast motion?), archive requirement and channel of distribution.

If you shoot at 1080p30 you can only author the BD in 1080i60 and some players have display to tell you it is 1080i60 on the disc. Your TV probably also can tell you what's coming in. This part is easy. The tricky part is during playback in how the original frames are reconstructed from the fields. It used to be a problem with DVD players and early HDTVs in the past. If not done properly there will be artefacts and loss of resolution. It's less of a problem nowadays. If you don't see anything untoward it's probably OK. If you need to check your playback chain's performance there are test discs with patterns to bring out these artefacts.

If you shoot at 1080p60 and author BD as 1080i60 (if that's what you mean by '1080p 60i'), you are losing information. Whether you notice any difference or any artefacts is another matter. Modern chips with motion adaptive de-interlacing usually give good results in 60p but there's no guarantee.

Ideally you would shoot at 1080i60 natively and that goes straight onto BD to keep the workflow as simple as possible but your camcorder can't. Native 60i records more temporal info than 30p turned into 60i later because each field in native 60i has moved along in time by 1/60s.

You could shoot at 1080p60 and author 1080p60 AVCHDs on DVDs but you need to make sure all your audience can play these themselves. For family video without much fast motion 60p is probably overkill but then DVD-Rs are so cheap nowadays.