30fps to 24fps

[Terence Curren]

You are screwed. At this point in time Avid doesn’t mix frame rates. Before someone starts singing the praises of FCP which allows you to throw anything in the timeline, please be aware that FCP does a shitty job of frame rate conversion.

Hopefully, Avid hasn’t doe it yet because they can’t do it correctly. To give you some perspective, the boxes that do semi=gracefully take 30 frames to 24 cost upwards of 70K. Terranex is an example of that.

On the other hand, if the original source is film, you are lucky as that probably has additional frames added in a 2:3 pulldown. And Avid can remove these on capture. You can change your project to SD 23.98 under the format tab, then capture from the digibeta. Avid will assume an “A” frame relationship and remove fields accordingly. Unless this is accurate, you will end up with footage that looks steppy.

If your original footage is not film, take it through a Terranex at some place that knows how to handle this. Then work with the resulting 23.98 blown up footage.

If you have a lot of footage, capture it as I described above for your offline and live with the steppy look. Then when you have a locked cut, convert just the footage you used to 1080 23.98 on a Terranex and cut it in to your sequence. This will cut down on your conversion costs which aren’t cheap.

Terence Curren
http://www.alphadogs.tv
http://www.digitalservicestation.com
Burbank,Ca

[Shane Ross]

Yeah…I like that Avid doesn’t even try…because they know it won’t look right. FCP does it, but yeah, it looks like crap.

That is why it comes with COMPRESSOR.

But he is right…you really need a Terranex to do this properly and cleanly. Frame rate differences are big.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Ian Johnson]

I tried digitizing from the digibeta at 23.98 in a 24fps SD project, but the Avid didn’t want to let me use that deck. Does the DVW-A500 have a setting that needs to be changed to allow this?

One thing I tried that almost worked was exporting a QT at 23.97. However even though the source had originally been shot in 24 and had a pulldown, it had apparently been edited in 30fps so the pulldown sequence changed every time there was a cut.

What I did was subclip every shot, and export them as QTs. I imported them into After Effects, detected and removed the pulldown for each one, then strung them out and rendered a single 1080 24p QT.

I know there is no easy way when the pulldown is jumping around, but I hoped there might be a simpler method if I am confronted with this problem again with 30i or something like a film daily where I can start on an A frame and know it won’t change.

It seems like it could be possible for Media Composer to handle something like this. It would need a kind of pulldown detection that will scan an entire clip and find changes in the sequence, rather than extrapolate from the first few frames. It might take some time to process, and result in a mixdown without source metadata, but it would be a start.

[Terence Curren]

[Ian Johnson] “I tried digitizing from the digibeta at 23.98 in a 24fps SD project, but the Avid didn’t want to let me use that deck. Does the DVW-A500 have a setting that needs to be changed to allow this? “

No special setting. This should work. I haven’t done true 24 in a while, but I guarantee 23.98 works.

[Ian Johnson] “It seems like it could be possible for Media Composer to handle something like this. It would need a kind of pulldown detection that will scan an entire clip and find changes in the sequence, rather than extrapolate from the first few frames. “

You need to tell MC what the pulldown is. It assumes that 0 and 5 frame endings are “A” frames.

Terence Curren
http://www.alphadogs.tv
http://www.digitalservicestation.com
Burbank,Ca

[Ian Johnson]

[Terence Curren] “[Ian Johnson] “It seems like it could be possible for Media Composer to handle something like this. It would need a kind of pulldown detection that will scan an entire clip and find changes in the sequence, rather than extrapolate from the first few frames. ”

You need to tell MC what the pulldown is. It assumes that 0 and 5 frame endings are “A” frames.”

I know it can’t do that now, it’s more of a feature request which I would think could be based on its current ability to detect pulldown (the fluid motion plugin does it). It’ll probably show up someplace like Premiere Pro first.