-
29.97 AE Project + 29.97 48k audio -> 23.98 deliverable
OK, so here is a question for which I am kinda sure I know the answer, but I want to put it to you wizards to see if I am missing something here.
I am working on an animated project that requires a 23.98/1080p deliverable. For reasons that will become clear I am pushing a 59.94 deliverable.
The problem is that the materials were never developed with the deliverable in mind. I know, please don’t get me started. I got brought into this project very very late in the game with everyone standing around going “huh?” to every question I asked re: frame rates and delivery.
I am outputting files from AE to ProRes422HQ for assembly in FCP. That part works a treat.
The audio lives at 29.97/48k and the complicated, heavily keyframed animation was created at 29.97. So the solutions I have tried are:
1. Rendering the AE project at 23.976. This produces a file that synchs fine in a “23.98” (23.976) FCP timeline. However, the animation is jittery. Changing the playrate in AE produces a final product that is noticeable jittery, skipping frames — skipping them consistently, but producing a final product that does not have the smoothly flowing animation desired.
2. Rendering the AE project at 29.97 and importing into an FCP 23.98 project. Produces the same sort of hinky animation as above.
3. Rendering the AE project at 29.97, conforming it to 23.98 in CInema Tools and importing into a 23.98 FCP project. This results in a smooth animation file, but (wait for it) the audio is of course about 20% too short. Slowing it down and pitch-shifting it in Soundtrack Pro gets everything synched up, but the dialogue, which in many cases is very rat-a-tat and wordy, often sounds as if the actors had had a stroke or other debilitating cognitive episode.
4. Taking the 29.97 AE output into a 59.94 FCP project. Everything synchs and is beautiful. But . . . the studio is insisting on 23.98 — or rather the at least three levels of uninformed proxies through which any request made by my boss go through before they get to anyone who has any clue about frame rates and delivery keep coming back to needing 23.98. I am quite certain that by the time anything I say gets to these folks it is like a game of “telephone” and the message is totally garbled by the time it gets there.
5. Outputting the 59.94 FCP project to tape and dubbing the 59.94 tape to a 23.98 tape. This looks great but the audio problem (the slowdown) produces the same appalling results as #3.
I am running out of ideas for getting this thing to live in a 23.98 world looking the way we need it to look. Just in the interest of due diligence, I appeal to you, COWsters. Am I missing anything that might solve this?
-
14 Replies
-
Is there footage in this project or all original animation?
-
All animation.
-
Then render your AE project at 23.98. Problem solved. Audio doesn’t have a frame rate.
Bret Williams
Web Design . Motion Graphics . Video Editing
http://www.bretwilliams.com -
[Bret Williams] “Then render your AE project at 23.98. Problem solved. Audio doesn’t have a frame rate. “
Exactly. Since AE is rather frame rate agnostic, simply duplicate your timeline, change the frame rate to 23.976 (not 23.98) and rerender. If you have any precomps, you must change those to 23.976 as well.
Are you using the audio out of AE, or syncing back in FCP? If so, there’s one other step you have to do.
Jeremy
-
If the AE output is jittery at 24 it could be you were interlacing at 29.97? So your frame rate just dropped from 60fps to 24. Yeah. Welcome to the wonderful world of 24fps that everyone seems to love. I don’t get it. Stuff is jittery and detail is lost during movement. To get 24p to look good in animation, it has to have motion blur turned on in the AE comp, which of course really screws readability if that’s something that’s needed. For example, I just finished up a scrapbook animation where the camera flys all over newspaper articles and such. At 24p with motion blur it was still jittery and you sure couldn’t read anything until it stopped moving from one item to another. At 29.97interlaced with about 1/3rd the motion blur, it was smooth as glass, readable, and still had a little motion blur. So I decided deliverables were going to be 59.94 720p for the HD, and 29.97i anamorphic for the SD DVD. Especially since we were dealing with a mix of 720 24p footage and SD 29.97i anamorphic footage and animation of my choosen frame rate. Jeremy helped me figure all that out a while back. For me, 24p is only viable if all your sources are 24p.
-
Well, as I mention in my original post, outputting the master comp
at 23.98 produces a sort of jittery result. And some minor synch issues a well. My sense from the start is that essentially all the sub-compa have to have their
fram rate changed as well – and in fact the keyframes don’t then always land on the intended frame, so a little tweaking needs to be done. The problem there is time and money. There are a couple of dozen projects and each of these has a ton of layers with animation happening on all of them. So my recommendation was not met with, shall we say, acclaim. Simply rendering out the master at 23.976 (please revisit my original post) won’t get it done. In answer to your question, I am laying back a temp mix at 29.97 initially, and later the deliverable stems for output. -
Exactly, this is pretty much my sense of it. Short of going back in and changing hundreds of layers and spending weeks of render time that the budget just is not there for, the real route to ” problem solved” is a 59.94 deliverable which looks stellar. In answer to a previous question, this project is all animation, and pretty detailed and heavily keyframed animation at that.
-
[Michael Sheehan] “So my recommendation was not met with, shall we say, acclaim. Simply rendering out the master at 23.976 (please revisit my original post) won’t get it done.”
You have to deliver @ 23.976, you want to render @ 29.97, and then get back to 23.976? This will be extremely hard to do without it looking pretty much like junk.
You are lucky that you are at the stage that you are, with all original material. You can simply set all the comps to 23.976, re-render, and be almost done. Duplicate your project and try it.
For the audio, in FCP, you need to delete all of the original audio out of your FCP project (or better yet, make a whole new project), then setup FCP in a 23.98 easy setup. Then Quit FCP. Then reopen your project and reimport the audio. Your audio will now be in sync.
As far as the jittery animations, it’s hard to talk about what you’re seeing without seeing it ourselves, but 24p has a much different look than 60Hz and that must be accounted for in your animation. It’s like shooting, you must adjust your shooting style if you are new to 24p and coming from 60Hz.
When you say 59.94, are you talking 1080i or 720p? There’s a difference.
Jeremy
-
I don’t know if you’ve read through this whole thing.
>>
You are lucky that you are at the stage that you are, with all original material. You can simply set all the comps to 23.976, re-render, and be almost done. Duplicate your project and try it.
<< Been there, done that. You are correct, of course, that works, but that's not my question. (The answer to which -- to use your words, "This will be extremely hard to do without it looking pretty much like junk" -- is pretty clear as it was to me when I posted originally, but I was hoping someone would have some miracle cure). The problem is not whether re-working the projects is possible. That's a given. Given the constraints of time and money and the nature of the AE projects and the dozens of sub-comps, many of them with effects layers that have already been rendered at 29.97, going back through each of these couple of dozen projects and re-working each comp and its component comps to 23.98 (and then checking that the keyframing is still frame-accurate, which in some of the tests we did it has not been) is not an option. That would add as much as two weeks, and perhaps more including re-rendering material that has already been output. If we can deliver at 59.94 1080i (which FCP >>
As far as the jittery animations, it’s hard to talk about what you’re seeing without seeing it ourselves, but 24p has a much different look than 60Hz and that must be accounted for in your animation. It’s like shooting, you must adjust your shooting style if you are new to 24p and coming from 60Hz.
<< Again, I am well aware of this and not at all unfamiliar with working in 24p and specifically in animated material. If I were here when these projects were being created and easily 1/3 of the material baked in at 29.97 I would have put the brakes on at once. But we're well past that point. And yes, the 23.98 output synchs to the 29.97 audio, more or less. But on some frame-specific moments -- for example, a character goes "knock knock" and moves his hand in time with the words and a sound effect -- it's not in synch, though synch holds overall. It's perhaps a frame or two out -- because what I sense is happening is that the render, to get the comp to 23.98, is basically applying a pulldown; or the keyframes are slipping, or some combination of the above. In any event -- I pretty much have the answer to my question. And believe me, I do not want to deliver at 23.98 and in reality, there is no compelling reason to other than somebody in a suit reading it off a delivery spec that has nothing to do with where this material is going to eventually be distributed, which ironically is going to be online at 29.97 in all likelihood. -
Also — to append my original post — having looked again at the 59.94 tape output to a 23.98 tape — it looks a little less hinky than the other 59.94 efforts, but not acceptable.
I am telling the boss there are four options — come up with the money to re-do the projects and re-render the existing material; tell them we are delivering at 59.94; deliver at 23.98 with a sub-optimal picture and live with it; or find a magic unicorn that will make all these problems go away. You already know what I am rooting for, and it ain’t the flippin’ unicorn.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up