720p60 3:2 Pulldown to 720p24 in Final Cut

[Jeremy Garchow]

Hmm. Don’t know about Blackmagic cards, but with Kona cards, you can capture varicam footage to whatever codec you want and remove the pulldown on the fly (just use a preset with the word Varicam, a frame rate of 23.98 and whatever codec you want to capture in it). You will kill yourself trying to remove all this pulldown. Get yourself a Kona card and recapture. Final Cut CAN remove the pulldown from varicam footage, but you would have had to have captured in DVCPro HD.

Jeremy

[Brad Weston]

We can’t recapture… what we have is what we have, for better or worse. We have DVCProHD on tape, but we don’t want to recapture from tape at a lower quality.

So, maybe I’ll kill myself, but I’d like to know exactly how I would go about fixing the problem. At present, I don’t really know.

We are editing in a 60fps timeline at present and it looks great, but for the filmout we’ll have to go to 24fps native. As I stated, about a fifth of the clips have the problem so the present plan of action is to identify these clips, change the in-point on the problem clips in the 60fps timeline, then bring them back into the 24fps timeline. My initial tests at this have not worked as planned however.

Any pointers, easy or hard, would be most welcomed.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Brad Weston] “We have DVCProHD on tape, but we don’t want to recapture from tape at a lower quality. “

Sorry. I am at a loss except if you manually delete frames. I would recapture especially if you need it for film out. Email Nattress, perhaps he can help you out with his plug in.

Jeremy

[Brad Weston]

Okay… HOW would I delete individual frames?

Already had the dialog with Nattress… no help unfortunately.

Still hoping for, playing around with, and researching a simpler way… but thanks!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Brad Weston] “Okay… HOW would I delete individual frames? “

Clip by clip, one by one.

I would rather eat glass.

Recapture @ 720p24 is your best bet or have you tried compressor?

[Matthew Nelson]

To jump in here Blackmagic is about a generation or two behind Kona on a couple of things this being one of them. However the decklink does pass through the RP188 data so you can use the DVCPro HD frame converter tool found in tools menu. But I don’t know if using the ProRes setup will screw this up.

[Brad Weston] “using Apple’s ProRes codec (looks fantastic by the way… for those interested there is definitely a visual difference between DVCProHD and ProRes when capturing from an uncompressed source)”

This I’m not getting. Your source is compressed. You are capturing from DVCPro HD tape recorded in the DVCPro HD codec. You are not going to get any better then that even if you capture in 10bit 4:4:4 uncompressed. Your source is your ceiling.

I would try the frame converter tool. If that’s a no go. You’d be better off recapturing using the Blackmagic 720P 59.94 DVCPro HD easy setup then pulling the duplicate frames in all your footage. I assume color correction is planned for your project and if you use Color you can render out of Color in ProRes HQ if that’s what you want as your final. Just note if you lay this back to DVCPro HD tape it will be recorded in that codec.

If pulling frames is really more of an option then recapture I’d look into renting a Snell & Wilcox Ukon. Which can correct broken cadences.

Matt

[Brad Weston]

Thanks for the reply, Matt.

I think you misunderstand… on the set we had an HD-SDI line running right from the camera to a capture machine so we were capturing via HD-SDI an UNCOMPRESSED stream, that was then compressed on the fly using ProRes 422… none of the footage we have has ever been compressed with DVCProHD. The reason for this is because there was a noticable difference in our blind tests between footage that was captured originally using DVCProHD and that using ProRes422. We recorded to tape simultaneously using DVCProHD to use as a backup, but Lord willing that won’t be necessary.

Our last project was captured and edited entirely in DVCProHD and we did some tests ingesting directly to ProRes and avoided some of the visual problems we saw with DVCProHD (and in the process created this unexpected new one).

The method you mention is what I was hoping for, but the DVCProHD Pulldown function of Final Cut only works with DVCProHD content. When I select it in Final Cut I get the message “No Video Found” or somesuch. We are editing the film entirely on the 59.94 timeline and at some point will just copy the entire set of footage into a 23.98 timeline and allow Final Cut to remove the frames. I’ve done this as a test and as I said, about 20% of the clips begin with the third frame and as such this would require that we go back to the 60p timeline and edit that clip, copy it, and bring it back into the 24p timeline. The clip editor of any clip in a 24fps sequence just shows the downconversion so you can’t set this within the clip editor directly (I call this an opportunity for development 🙂 )

In any case, thanks for your help.

bRaD

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

Your mistake was in not investigating what it would take to maintain the cadence information in the original recording. You can record uncompressed in 720p/60 from a Varicam, but you have to record the entire vertical interval and maintain the VITC user bits when you do it. This is what the Varicam uses for its “frame flags” that allow automated recovery of the original 24 frames in post. Without it, you’re forced to figure it out on a clip by clip basis. If you were compressing to ProRes “on the fly,” then you were recording with a Mac based device by definition. If you were doing that, you had some type of capture card in the loop, and if THAT were the case, you should have been able to remove the pulldown frames as you were recording. That would have been a much better approach, as among other things, it would have required less storage.

There are far too many formats out there today, and there are far too many pitfalls in each one. When you decide to kludge a new approach, you need to do your homework – ahead of time – if you want to be able to post it efficiently and accurately.

[Brad Weston]

Believe me, I’m well aware of my mistake in not working through this ahead of time, but that doesn’t help me now. We began this process with a plan to use the AJA IoHD, but it didn’t ship in time so we had to quickly find a different solution.

I am happy to “figure it out” on a clip by clip basis if there was a tool that would allow me to remove the extra ProRes frames, but I don’t know of such a tool. In Final Cut, the DVCProHD Frame Rate Converter does not pay any attention to the ProRes Clips. Is anyone aware of a tool that will allow me to do this?

[Matthew Nelson]

The last resort before the DVCPro tapes most likely is the S&W Ukon, but I’d call a dubb house or post facility to run a test. The Ukon may not help since the VITC has been divorced from the Varicam source.

Matt