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24p PAL to 50i PAL workflow: Can FCP do the 4.2% speed up on the fly?
It’s starting to look possible that a project that I’m currently working on may get moved from Avid to Final Cut Pro. Usually this isn’t TOO big of a headache, but the workflow here is particularly weird, and for once I find that I’m being confronted with a real limitation in FCP that is seriously screwing me up.
Right now our workflow is working well. Our footage is coming in as digital files @ 24p PAL SD (it’s animation). In Avid we are cutting in a 24p PAL project, and on playback the Avid speeds up our output (video and audio) on the fly 4.2% so that we can preview our cutting in true 25fps (50i). This is, of course, the proper way to telecine film to PAL.
What I’m wondering is whether Final Cut supports on the fly speed up. We want to work in 24fps for audio reasons (otherwise we’d have to speed up all of the audio coming into our project, and that’s simply unfeasable), but tooling around in FCP all I see are 24@25 REPEAT and 24@25 PULLDOWN options for on the fly playback on a PAL monitor. Both of these “options” look fairly terrible with stuttery choppy motion.
So, what are my options? I should mention that I’m on a G5 with FCP 5.0 and equipped with a Blackmagic Extreme card (which doesn’t seem to be much help either). Are there other cards that can do this for FCP? Or is this feature buried somewhere in the program where I simply cannot see it?
OR as I fear, is this impossible in Final Cut? Do you HAVE to cut in 25fps in FCP?
Any info would be extremely appreciated,
Sam -
4 Replies
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FCP doesn’t do this correctly, it’ll insert frames.
Cinema Tools, which come with FCP, are meant for conforming clips to other speeds.Regards,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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Forgot to mention one thing: of course you won’t get true 50i, it’ll stay progressive and just look like film on TV.
Where should the extra temporal information come from?Reagrds,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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24@25 PULLDOWN is smooth. 24@25 REPEAT is jerky and intended for slower machines. 4.2% Speed up in FCP was available only with Aurora Igniter hardware. What is the codec of your footage?
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Although better than 24@25 REPEAT, 24@25 PULLDOWN is still not ideal. Like I said before, this is animaiton and the motion is very sharp. On fast pans and quick character movement the 24@25 PULLDOWN just looks terrible.
It’s also unacceptable for us to evaluate footage that is not playing back the same way it’ll be playing back when the project is finished.
I did notice that DV PAL looks exceptionally terrible, and looking into it there appears to be somehthing strange about PAL DV fields… If we were to go with FCP we would stay away from DV for our off-lining and probably use Photo-Jpeg or simply stay online at 10-bit. Really, the codec can be anything. If there’s a codec that will allow us to work at 24 sped up to 25 then we’d probably go for it.
What Igniter card supports the speed up, and does it work exactly as it should? Does it speed up the audio as well as the video? Are there known issues with this?
Sam
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