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

[Jeremy Garchow]

Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough before, Brad.

the tool is you, clip by clip frame by frame. Load a clip in the timeline take the first frame of each 3:2 sequence and delete the duplicate frame(s) after it. When you have done that you will be left with 24 discrete frames. Remember how I said I would rather eat glass than do this? I wasn’t kidding.

Save yourself the trouble and recapture from your backup. At least you had a backup in place. You can capture your source tapes to ProResHQ @ 24p. This will help in a film out anyway as all timecodes and cut lists can be tracked.

Or as had been mentioned, you might be able to run all of your footage through an external box such a Ukon, Terranex, Alchemist or whatever, but at that point it’s going to get transcoded anyway and cost you boat loads of dough, so you might as well recapture from your source tapes and squeeze every ounce of quality you can from that.

I KNOW it’s not the answer you want to hear, I know. But recapturing from your source tapes will save you the most time, money and hair on your head in the long run.

Jeremy

[John Kaley]

I’ve used Cinema Tools to do this. Open a clip in Cinema Tools that you want to remove the pulldown from. Click the “reverse telecine” button at the bottom of the clip. These are the setting I’ve used, but you may have to tweek them based on your clips.
Capture Mode: Field 1 only
Fields: Style1 A
Frames Conform to 23.976 do not check “Standard upper/lower”
File: New or same, depending on if you want your files overwritten or not.

[Jeremy Garchow]

This works with 720p60 footage?

[John Kaley]

I did a test on 720p60 footage and it works fine. My settings were:
Capture mode: Field1-Field2
Fields: Style1 AA
Frames: Conform to 23.976 with the “Standard Upper/Lower” box checked
File: Create New

You’ll need to tell Cinema Tools where your A frame is. My clip was WWSSW which makes the A frame on timecode numbers 0 and 5. (This is the AA thing in the settings above) Select BB or BC….etc based on which timecode frame you footage starts on.

[Sean Oneil]

My first Varicam project I made the same mistake of cutting in 60p instead of 24p.

The key is to recapture in 24p. Create a new 23.98 Varicam sequence. Then copy and paste your clips into this new sequence and then make the media offline. Then recapture using 23.98 Varicam settings. The way it works is confusing. The deck plays back at 60p, but Final Cut removes the redundant frames during capture.

I used Firewire from a AJ-1200A deck. But I believe a BMD card has Varicam settings so it can do the same thing.

Because you cut in 60p, your sequence will have bad 3:2 cadence. So when you recapture/rebuild in 24p, you’ll have to manually close up a 1-frame gap in between occasional edit points. Other than that, it will all come in perfectly. It’s by far your best solution.

Sean

[Jeremy Garchow]

John, how are you getting this to work? I have 720p60 footage here in three different codecs and reverse telecine is grayed out for each one. I am happy to totally correct any wrong methods that I might have said in this thread. As far as I know, Cinema Tools rev telecine only works on 60i footage.

Jeremy

[John Kaley]

Hello Jeremy. I assumed the footage was 60i because he said is was shot 24p and has 3:2 pulldown in it. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. You are correct that Cinema Tools needs 60i source footage to work. I’m not familiar with 60p footage that has 3:2 pulldown it in. How’s that possible?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[John Kaley] “I’m not familiar with 60p footage that has 3:2 pulldown it in. How’s that possible? “

Well, we are heading off topic here, but 720p60 is 60 discreet progressive frames per second. If you have 720p24 then you simply add 3:2 pulldown to get you up to 60. Instead of the pattern going in fields (3 fields then 2 fields) it goes in whole frames. 3 duplicate FRAMES then two duplicate frames. 3:2 pulldown. Then you go from 720p24 to 720p60. The ‘active’ and duplicate frames get flagged as an active or duplicate frame upon being recorded to the DVCPro HD data stream. When capturing, Final Cut can then capture just the active frames and skip the duplicates based on their flagged information leaving you with 23.98 media. It’s a very very cool system.

Jeremy

[Brad Weston]

Okay, so I have a solution and I want to run it by folks here to get their opinions on it. Please do so based on the facts that I tell you here because it goes counter to what you may think in your head.

I did a test and ran some source 60p clips that were part of an edited sequence through Compressor at 24p (source material was ProRes HQ, output is ProRes HQ). The net results on a clip-by-clip basis show ZERO difference in a Final Cut Pro timeline. Let me reiterate this. the “recompressed” 24 fps “recompressed” clip looks IDENTICAL to the 60fps original clip. A blind A/B comparison had no less than 6 people not able to tell a difference, or even that the switch had been made.

So, in “recompressing” the clips (from an uncompressed ProRes quality to an uncompressed quality ProRes movie), about a fifth of the output clips have frame doubling because of the cadence issues that have been seen throughout this thread. I just opened up these problem 60p source clips, deleted the first frame, “recompressed” them to 24p, and voila… they play fine.

I “relinked” the source clips of my timeline to these new 24p clips and there were a couple quick black flashes… easy to correct.

Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough because the word “recompress” inherently means “degrade quality” under normal circumstances, but there is ZERO noticable difference between the clips. Any objections that should be made to this should address technical problems that are not related to image quality.

(For those who have not read the full thread, the source content was recorded live from the camera via uncompressed HD-SDI on set to the computer and compressed with ProRes. All clips were compressed directly from uncompressed footage, not from DVCProHD. We have DVCProHD backups on tape, but would prefer to not have to use it.)

Thanks!

bRaD

[Jeremy Garchow]

Image quality is one thing, ProRes should handle multiple generations without much trouble which you have found out. It’s the cadence that’s really the issue. Are you saying that you have no more duplicate frames? Why’d you delete the first frame? Just curious…

Jeremy