adding flags to a Panasonic 1200 deck for reverse telecine in post?

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

Neither the 1200 nor any other Panasonic deck can add frame flags to anything. They are inserted in the camera when the pulldown pattern is created, so they are part of the data stream prior to recording. The only way to have any kind of predictable pattern from a telecine transfer is to transfer using the “0 and 5” conventions, which is a generally accepted method of editing from telecine so that film “A” frames all fall on time code numbers that end in 0 and 5.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Mike Most] “Neither the 1200 nor any other Panasonic deck can add frame flags to anything.”

That’s absolutely correct. All you can do on the 1200A is to turn on the User Bits so it recognizes the flags in a feed from a Varicam or other Panasonic HD camera via HD-SDI. You cannot “flag” frames on the way out from an FCP timeline.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Xstimux]

how do I make sure when laying down footage from the da vinci onto the 1200 deck that I can excract the 59.94 footage from the tape to 23.98 footage inside FCP or Cinema Tools? I was not able to do this no matter what I did the last time I layed to tape via telecine. Cinema Tools or FCP could not compute the 59.94 > 23.98 because I heard that there was no flagged frames telling FCP where to extract from. Is this makign sense?

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

If you’re trying to do this in real time via Firewire, forget it. Final Cut is not capable of extracting “normal” 3:2 pulldown from Firewire sources (btw, Avid can, even in XPress Pro). You must use Cinema Tools to do the extraction after the material has already been digitized (at 59.94).

[Xstimux]

I am laying it down right to DVCPRO HD for a DVCPRO HD timeline. Its got to match my HVX200 footage. Which is 720p 24p. Everyone is telling me I can do this within Cinema Tools but its impossible for me to do no matter what I do. Please hit the link below and see if you can get this footage to 23.98 within Cinema Tools without it looking slow:

https://www.timecodeentertainment.com/downloads/16mmtest_1.zip

[Mike Most — account bouncing, bad address]

I did it, but it’s a bit convoluted.

Cinema Tools does not understand 60 frame material (it only understands fields), so it cannot directly reverse a 720/60p clip. What I did was take the clip into Final Cut. I then dropped it into a 1080i/60 timeline, scaled it to fit, and exported as a QT self contained movie (you could also render to do this). I was then able to reverse telecine the clip in Cinema Tools (although I did have to change the 3:2 sequence to “BB”). I then brought the resulting 1080p/23.98 clip back into Final Cut, dropped it back into a 720p/23.98 sequence and, voila.

Granted, this is a lot of work to accomplish what you want. But I also didn’t tell you to use DVCProHD tape as a telecine transfer format. The big problem here that few people seem to understand is that 720p/24 doesn’t exist as a supported video format – it’s only used within a computer. The only supported video format – and thus the only supported tape format – is 720p/60. Since the use of a 24 frame variant is really tied to Varicam (and HVX200) shot footage, it’s not a good idea to use it as a telecine transfer format, even if it’s technically possible. You’re actually better off laying it down to DVCProHD tape as 1080i, since that format is much more easily reversed back to 24 frame mode, then resized accordingly. You could also try asking the facility to go directly to a hard disk using the DVCPro HD codec, perhaps at 1080p/24. That can easily be resized for use in your 720 project.