1080psf 23.98 to 1080i?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Scott van Beever] “Do i simply capture the 23.98 tape at 1080i 59.97? “

That’d be the easiest. What deck do you have? Hopefully it has the 3:2 pulldown board and you can simply capture the 23.98 footage with pulldown to get you to 29.97

Make sense?

Jeremy

[Scott Van beever]

i’ll be using an HDCAM deck via HD-SDI. so capturing with 3:2 pulldown will get me 1080i correctly?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Scott van Beever] “so capturing with 3:2 pulldown will get me 1080i correctly?”

Yep. Your footage is going to have a different motion characteristic than the 60i footage, but at lesat you will be able to edit them all together easily.

Jeremy

[Sean Oneil]

Final Cut is not the right tool for mixing film and video frame rates because it doesn’t add 3:2 footage when editing 23.98 footage in a 59.94i sequence.

You can do what Jeremy suggests and captuire it all at 59.94i, but every edit you make in the film footage is going to cause a cadence break. This will translate into nasty interlacing artifacts when someone sees this on the web or on most HDTV sets. Honestly, it’s not pretty.

Alternatively you can capture it at 23.98 and edit in the 59.94i sequence. Final Cut adds 2:2:2:4 progressive pulldown. Motion might look a little jerky, but there won’t be any interlacing artifacts.

Neither option is ideal, which is why I said FCP is the wrong tool for this. Not sure what the latest versions of Avid or Adobe Premiere can do, but if it were me I would look into it.

Sean

[Paul Hillman]

I’m in a similar boat as the original poster. I have HDCAM tapes that are recorded in 1080psf 23.98 (archival film transfers), and want to follow this latest suggestion to capture at 23.98 using a Kona 3 card via HDSDI. However, I can’t get a clean picture in my log and capture window when setting the capture preset to anything but AJA Kona3: 1080i 29.97 DVCPro HD?!!? (The rest of the show was shot with a Varicam and we’re editing in a 720p 23.98 DVCPro HD timeline, hence the DVCPro HD codec in the capture preset).

So,

#1: Am I missing any settings in order to capture the 1080psf 23.98 footage into a FCP system with a Kona 3? I’ve tried the 1080psf 23.98 DVCProHD and the 1080psf 24 DVCProHD capture presets, and neither give me a clean picture in the log and capture window.

#2: The issue with capturing using the 1080i 29.97 DVCPro HD capture preset is that FCP keeps detecting timecode breaks since the timecode is 24 based on the HDCAM tape. I’m capturing it now by setting FCP to ignore timecode breaks, but this doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Any ideas on best practice here?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Paul Hillman] “Any ideas on best practice here? “

Do you have bi-level sync going to your KOna? If so, set your Kona’s Genlock to free run and it should clear up, or if you have tri-level sync, set your generator to output that and set your Kona to genlock @ tri-level.

Jeremy

[Paul Hillman]

Aha, the sync sounds like it’s clearly my issue. This is my first attempt to capture anything in 1080psf 23.98, so there’s some research I need to do on the engineering end of things. At the moment, I just had the HDSDI signal coming into the Kona 3 card from the Sony HDW-D1800 deck, and I have noticed FCP is capturing (using the 1080i 29.97 preset mentioned above) the 23.98fps material to 29.97fps by writing each frame in a 29.97fps clip, thereby shortening the overall time by 20% and slightly speeding up the action.

So do I need a standalone sync generator to capture this 1080psf 23.98 footage at true 23.98, or can I run sync directly to/from the HDCAM deck and the Kona cards? We are a growing shop, and currently don’t have a standalone generator, but do have other HD decks if those can also serve as sync generators.

thanks.

[Jeremy Garchow]

No, the Kona doesn’t necessarily need sync. Just put the card in freerun and you should be able to capture 23.98 as long as your deck is in 23.98 mode (not not pulldown mode). Does your Kona control panel say that you are getting 1080sf23.98 on the SDi input side of things?

Jeremy

[Paul Hillman]

Doh! That was exactly it, I forgot to switch the deck’s frequency over to 23.98 to get it out of the pull-down mode. Thanks a ton Jeremy–it’s capturing smoothly now at 23.98.