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Well i thought it was interesting…
Editing a corporate at the moment for a regular international client.
They set me through a PTC and B roll from 3 overseas factories that had been shot locally (not particularly well but that’s another story), these are being combined with archive we keep and some footage we shot specifically for the project in the London – in 25p.
I cut the first of the three films and sent it off for review, but it wasn’t till I was looking at something I noticed that the PTC in the film was 29.97.
FCP X literarily didn’t bat an eyelid!
Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor -
10 Replies
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And so FCP joins the other NLEs in the 21st century.
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What were the shots? Talking heads, static wides, fast action, pans etc? A wide static of a factory would look OK in FCP7
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A static talking head..
It wasn’t the shots – its the fact I didn’t even notice that got me..
Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor -
Interesting.
This however would also be a feature apple should add to FCPX – timeline notifications for mixed frame rates – similar to say how FCP7 shows out-of-sync clips. Whatever magic you use, editing 29.97 fps in a 25p timeline will make the image suffer to some degree.
Cool it works though.
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[Michael Sanders] “A static talking head..
It wasn’t the shots – its the fact I didn’t even notice that got me..
“It’s not that unusual for talking heads to look passable with the 5 missing frames a second, and in the case of NTSC/PAL, the bump in size. Of course a swing of the neck or bob of the head can toss that right out. Machine transfer is still the best, and even that ain’t that great. But I cut a lot of action, so I’m very–perhaps overly–sensitive to it.
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[Chris Harlan] “It’s not that unusual for talking heads to look passable with the 5 missing frames a second, and in the case of NTSC/PAL, the bump in size. Of course a swing of the neck or bob of the head can toss that right out. Machine transfer is still the best, and even that ain’t that great. But I cut a lot of action, so I’m very–perhaps overly–sensitive to it.
“I released an NTSC version of a PAL airshow DVD this year with some very fast moving footage in. I simply dropped the PAL master into an NTSC project, conformed the speed using optical flow and it looked great. I’d been using the Nattress converter in FCP7 which is superb, but I think the results in X were slightly better.
Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television -
[Steve Connor] “[Chris Harlan] “It’s not that unusual for talking heads to look passable with the 5 missing frames a second, and in the case of NTSC/PAL, the bump in size. Of course a swing of the neck or bob of the head can toss that right out. Machine transfer is still the best, and even that ain’t that great. But I cut a lot of action, so I’m very–perhaps overly–sensitive to it.
”I released an NTSC version of a PAL airshow DVD this year with some very fast moving footage in. I simply dropped the PAL master into an NTSC project, conformed the speed using optical flow and it looked great. I’d been using the Nattress converter in FCP7 which is superb, but I think the results in X were slightly better.
“I find PAL to NTSC ver do-able. It even works relatively well in FCP 6-7. I’ve done a lot of Sizzle reels that mix both in the timeline. It is going the other way–NTSC to PAL, where you are losing frames and gaining pixels–that is the real issue.
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I don’t know how the results would stack up in standard-def, but recently on several projects I’ve had to convert 60i HD footage down to 23.98… and I’ve gotten nearly flawless results in After Effects CS5.5, using ‘pixel motion’ frame-blending. Even shaky handheld footage has come through very nicely, and the only artifacting I’ve seen has been slight aliasing on thin horizontal lines because of the de-interlacing.
I suppose the question is – Would progressive 29.97 give it enough temporal data to reconstruct and blend frames smoothly? Or am I only getting good results because it has twice as many (half)frames to work with from the 60i? Probably worth a test one of these days…
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I can’t wait for 300p which can be divided nicely by all frame rates.
Seriously I find i footage makes smoother slomos than p so I presume it will also give smoother frame rate conversions as well.
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Part of my reactions are probably because I work at the extreme end of transfer issues, which would be action oriented broadcast promos–a lot of 7 to 10 frame cuts, a lot of very chaotic action in very short bursts, a lot of speed manipulation, and messing with size. And, I spend a lot of time looking at both foreign and domestic versions, so I’ve come to make a lot of editing choices based on how it will look in both worlds. All of this probably makes me hyper-conscious of the issues.
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