23.98 to negative cut

[Maya30]

I am going to export the OMF files once we have a lock picture. If i understand you correctly you’re saying that i am going to have sync problems while editing? what i’m worried about is that i am going to have sync problems once we send the lock picture to negative cut.

[Frank Nolan]

[maya30] “I am going to export the OMF files once we have a lock picture. If i understand you correctly you’re saying that i am going to have sync problems while editing? what i’m worried about is that i am going to have sync problems once we send the lock picture to negative cut.
“

Well if you have sync problems while editing, you will certainly have sync problems when trying to match the mixed audio back to a print from the negative cut. I am not saying you are going to have sync problems while editing as I dont know if your dat audio was pulled down prior to importing into FCP, that is why I suggested playing a long clip to check for sync. Did you try playing one of your longer clips to see if it stays in sync for the entire length of the clip?

[Maya30]

I haven’t tried yet playing a long clip. i will try to do it and see what happens.

[Samuel Frazier]

My other compter died today so I post all my bookmarks and I had a link to a site that would explain this whole thing for you start to finish. But the idea is that you shot the film at 24 fps exactly then when you transfered to video your picture went to the lovely world of 29.97 and 23.98 instead of 30 and 24. Meanwhile, no adjustment was made to your audio so is also needs to be brought to the wonderful world of fractions. So you have to do the .1% adjustment as was mentioned or eventually your audio and video will drift out of sync.
I believe the general rule is that the drift is unnoticable unless your take is longer than 30 seconds. When in doubt, you could always try to get ahold of a program like Nuendo that will batch convert all your audio (in this case only dialog). Then just make all your dialog offline in FCP, then reconnect it and direct it towards the new audio with the adjustment added. Really shouldn’t be too much trouble at all and no resyncing.
I’m sure there must be other programs that will do the batch convert, but I just happened to watch a Nuendo demo on their site the other day that showed the batch convert.

[Maya30]

Thanks! and what happens when i go back to film? cause if the audio is pulled down and then i do go back to the 24p world of film, then the sound is not going to be in sync again. my main concern is the negative cut and not thrwoing things out of sync at that stage (the negative cutting stage)

[Samuel Frazier]

Good question. Truth of the matter is I’m a nobody and as much as I’d like it, I’ll probably never have a movie put back to film. So I don’t really know. My advice is to ask the company doing the transfer what they want. They’ll be doing all the work after all.
Here’s the article about syncing to 2-3 video that I was able to find if you still want to take a look, though I don’t think it covers match back to film.

https://www.zerocut.com/tech/2_3_audio.html

[Maya30]

thank you, I appreciate your help.

[Samuel Frazier]

Glad to be of help. I’m new to FCP and this forum and have gotten a lot of help from here. So, anytime some asks something about a suject I had to do some research on, I feel like I should try to give back a bit.
Good luck!