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Problem when mixing 50fps and 60fps Twixtored on Final Cut Pro.
Hello,
I’ve been working on a project which creates slow motion from 50fps and 60fps source videos. In order to build it, we tossed all the videos to a 60fps sequance in Final Cut Pro 7.0.2. Twixtoring of the 60fps vidoes works great. However, when twixtoring 50fps videos on a 60fps sequence, thing won’t be so smooth, because when 50fps videos are put in a 60fps FCP sequence, FCP will duplicate some frames to make it 60fps compliant. The problem with twixtor is that when it encounters those duplicate frames, rather than discard them, it uses it as ‘correct’ frames, so the output looks jittery (the motion is not fluid).
Putting all files on 50fps sequence won’t help: both 50fps and 60fps will *seem* to twixtor fine. But in reality, when you put an 60fps in a 50fps video FCP is discarding 12% of the frames before applying twixtor.
The workaround I have been applyinf is to keyframe the frame field in twixtor to manually skip the duplicate frames of 50fps clips, but boy, this is time consuming. Can anybody think of a better solution?
Best,
Ricardo -
9 Replies
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You can use Cinema Tools to effectively changed the frame rate of the 50 FPS movie so it plays faster (60 FPS) and then account for that with Twixtor.
See this tutorial
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/freitag_lori/twixtor-fcp-frc.phpPierre
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Thanks pierre! That looks like a great solution, the problem is it seems that Cinematools can only coform to 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97 and 30fps. It seems there’s no confroming option to 50fps or 60fps, which is what I would need.
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Welcome to the wonderful world of FCP and it’s ability to tell you “what’s best” when it comes to frame rate :-).
So the only other solution is to write out all the images of your 50fps sequence out as image files (one file per frame), read them back in with QT Player 7 (where you can set the frame rate to 60), and then save out as a 60fps movie.
that’s the only other solution I know of. And note that QT Player 7 will let you conform an image sequence to 60fps, but not 59.94 🙁
Note that if you’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard, then QT Player 7 is in /Applications/Utilities.
Pete Litwinowicz -
Yeah, FCP has been bitchy lately about framerates, clip speed changes, audio sync, etc. I wish they could make it more consistent and predictable.
That Quicktime workflow, although possible, sounds a tad nightmarish. I would rather reconform all footage, both 50fps and 60fps, to 30fps and speed up from there.
Does anybody know if After Effects allows reconforming of clips to 60fps? I’m guessing it might.
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Yes, AE allows any frame rate up to 99fps.
Even better, if you were to drop your 50fps clip into a 60fps composition (the AE equivalent of FCP’s sequences), you can apply Twixtor and tell Twixtor the input frame rate is 50fps and Twixtor will do the “right thing” without any conforming necessary. This is because we can get to all the frames in mixed frame rates within AE, where we can’t inside FCP.
Pete
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Thanks for this useful information, guys.
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Peter: I continued to think about this problem lately and I wanted to ask: wouldn’t it be relatively easy to implement a “duplicate frame detector checkbox” within the FCP Twixtor plugin? That would be a nice time saver for the case I mentioned.
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Actually producing a UI that makes this work properly is not as easy as you think. I won’t go into the details.
Also, the REAL fix is to get Apple to understand that people need to conform movies at various frame rates (and not just the standard video rates… what about web delivery with odd frame rates for compression purposes, like 10fps?). For example, doing this with other software (like After Effects) is a snap because they treat frame rate as a “first class citizen”.
I highly recommend you inform Apple that you would like to more frame rate capabilities, and that you would like to see FCP allow plugin developers to be able to handle varying frame rates of footage and sequences in a proper way (you can say that developers need to be able to “access all the frames of a movie that is a differing frame rate than the sequence it resides within) . You can do that here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html
Pete
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Also you can also request that Apple supports writing key-framed parameters at time in their apps (in FxPlugs). This would help such process so you actually see what the program computes and “object” by deleting a keyframe for example…
there is already a few developer request including radar #8223125
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