59.94 3:2 pulldown

[Chris Wright]

You need to find out if it is interlaced or not, then go from there.
Try AE guess pulldown and then try leave fields off and view footage. If you see scanlines in fast motion, you have fields in video.

My guess is, since many animations do double framerate to rotor on, so you have a field a frame. 1 x field a frame. 29.97 * 2 = 59.94 Then I don’t see any reason to worry about pulldown. There’s nothing to pulldown.

[Jonathan Hudson]

thanks for responding…

there is no interlacing on the frames. thats why it was so confusing to me because i thought the process of a “pulldown” was to take the progressive frames of the vericam camera and make them fit to a video framerate by adding the interlacing so 4 frames stretch across 5 frames… right?

But right now (no pulldown 59.94) when i go frame by frame through the shot there are actually 2 identical frames (as opposed to 1 frame being upper fields and the next being lower fields) then 3 identical frames and then 2 and then 3 and so on throughout the shot. as i understand it, i need to eliminate those extra frames so when i add animation the animated objects aren’t moving during the frames that are just standing still.

i’m not sure what you’re saying here:
My guess is, since many animations do double framerate to rotor on, so you have a field a frame. 1 x field a frame. 29.97 * 2 = 59.94 Then I don’t see any reason to worry about pulldown. There’s nothing to pulldown.

Thanks again for any help you can offer.

[Kevin Camp]

59.94 fps would be a typical frame rate for 720p footage, which is what it sounds like you have (a frame size of 960×720 and frame rate of 59.94). in that case you would not need to remove a pulldown or deinterlace, the frames are already progressive.

do you know the footage was shot at 24p (23.976 progressive) or were you assuming when they said progressive footage they were shooting in 23.976…?

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jonathan Hudson]

thanks for your response.

your saying that 59.94 is progressive? that is consistent with what i see in the clips, except my problem is that there are 2 identical progressive frames followed by 3 identical progressive frames from beginning to end in the clip. so now if i try to animate my fx on top of that clip my animations will move during the frames that are identical (not moving). Does that make sense?

so what i need to know is how to animate on top 59.94 footage so my animations line up with the footage. or change the 59.94 footage so there are no duplicated frames, animate on that and then return it to 59.94 in the end.

i don’t know the framerate the camera was shooting, its my assumption it was 23.976 progressive.

thanks again

[Chris Wright]

DVCPRO HD only records at 1280×1080 or prefilters @ 960×720 the DSP to a recorded size of 960×720, A camcorder using a special variable-framerate (from 4 to 60 frame/s) variant of DVCPRO HD called -VariCam- is also available.

Sound familiar?

[Andrew Wahlquist]

Kevin is right, there is no field interlacing at all in a 59.94 720p footage. So in AE, you don’t need to do anything with the pulldown menu in Interpret footage, except to leave it off.

You can simply drop your 59.94 footage into a 23.976 timeline and AE will figure it out correctly on its own. (that is assuming that they recorded an actual 23.976 frame rate encapsulated by a 59.94 video stream).

In 59.94 footage you will see 3 full progressive frames followed by 2 full progressive frames of the 24p footage. 3:2:3:2 etc with no interlacing going on.

Whenever you’re done, you’ll need to use a converter or a separate render in after effects to convert your new 23.976 rendered video to the 720p59.94 standard. This happens pretty easily as well, provided you don’t tell it do do anything tricky like pixel motion or inter-frame interpolation. It should just spread out the frames 3:2:3:2 on its own.

[Jonathan Hudson]

Ok so the missing piece for me was that it was supposed to be dropped into a 23.976 timeline. i’ve never had to do anything like that before so i didn’t even think of it. but that works. Thanks very much!