29.97 footage in 23.98 sequence – solution?

[John Pale]

You can remove the pulldown using both Cinema Tools or within FCP 6 itself. You should do this before you begin editing.

From the FCP manual (page 426)…

To remove 2:3:3:2 advanced pull-down from your media files after capture:
m Select the 29.97 fps clips in the Browser, then choose Tools > Remove Advanced Pull-down.
Your media files will remain the same size, but they will be set to play back at 23.98 fps.
If no advanced pull-down flags are detected, the media file remains at 29.97 fps.

The Cinema Tools Manual (help menu) has lots of info on this beginning on page 211.

If the pulldown flags are not present, you might want to try using Compressor to convert them to 23.98. Hopefully it won’t come to that.

[Jeffrey Mcmahon]

Thanks to both of you for your pointers. Here’s the update:

When I use the Remove Advanced Pull-Down feature in FCP, I either get an error message (“File does not contain frames encoded using Advanced Pulldown”) or I get clips with ugly-looking interlaced frame-blending.

Likewise, I tried Reverse Telecine in Cinema Tools, attempting a variety of different cadences, and every time got ugly interlaced images.

Capturing individual shots within my problematic footage worked on a couple of tapes, but not all. On several tapes, no matter how small of a clip I captured, the footage persisted in coming in as 29.97 when digitizing using the 29.97 Advanced Pulldown tool.

So my next question is, assuming that I’m combining 29.97 footage into my 23.98 project for the offline edit, how difficult is it going to be to resolve this problem in the online stage?

[Jeffrey Mcmahon]

Like I said, it was shot at 23.98pA and thanks to a variety of time code breaks and tape glitches, certain pieces of footage will not digitize properly using Advanced Pulldown Removal. I’m talking about things like a five minute chunk of 29.97 footage in the middle of a tape that’s otherwise in 23.98, or 3 minutes at the end of the tape, etc.

I did have some luck with a stretch of footage by digitizing it directly at 23.98 instead of at 29.97 using advanced pulldown removal. However, that only worked for a few minutes of footage and then the cadence shifted resulting in several minutes of unusable frame-blended shots.

Anyway, I need further information. I am obviously not intending to ‘just hope for the best’, I’m asking what tools are usable in an online setting to fix clips such as these that are stubbornly refusing to behave according to the tools that I’ve tried already. My current strategy is to continue until the film is closer to being finished (say, cut down to a 4-hour version) by which point there will be only, say, half an hour of problematic material instead of my current 8 hours.

[Keith Rivers]

If you can get onto a PC try using Virtual Dub V 1.8.6 or 1.8.8 (they’re free) open up your mov file with Avisynth (.avsp)

They have a tfm() code (tritical field matcher) which does a hell of a job removing interlacing. Then you have to decimate to drop that one duplicate frame for every 5 frames.

Here’s the code I use:

tfm(mode=0,display=false,mi=80)

tdecimate()

or if you want to get fancy:

tfm(mode=0,display=false,cthresh=2,blockx=8,blocky=8,mi=16)

tdecimate()

avisynth.org or doom.net can show you more than the creative cow forums on this.

Good luck!

keith
youtube.com/krfilms