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Canon XH A1 24f footage
Hi there. Thank you in advance for you input.
After hours upon hours of searching the internet for answers I’ve now decided to post my questions for your input.
We would like to shoot all of our footage on Canon XH A1 in 24f to ensure the “film look” that so many of us enjoy.
What are the best settings for capturing 24f in FCP?
I have read conflicting information in the web. Do you need to run the 24f footage through any conversions for drop-down or interlacing purposes? or does FCP automatically handle that? The raw footage looks “jumpy”.
What is the best sequence setting for using 24f footage that will ultimately need to be put back out at 29.97? Are there any rules of thumb regarding mixing frame rates in the editing process?
Can you shoot 24 and 60 frame on the same tape? Or do you need to change tapes each time you change frame rate?
Thank you in advance for you advice.
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3 Replies
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This article was written with DVX-100 in mind. It explains a lot about 24p.
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/24p_in_FCP_nattress.htmlSteve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
I just read the article the last guy referred to and, although it was very insightful to the world of 24p, it didn’t really help to solve my problem (which is the same problem posted here). What are the best settings to use in FCP (if you shot in HD, 24f, 1080i/480i on a Canon XH A1) if your ultimate goal is to transfer to film?
I added a post asking this question in the forum before I read this one.
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Robert,
That is a very vague question, it would completely depend on your overall workflow. What time of image sequence are you wanting to end up with? 23.98 PsF or 29.97 with a pulldown added? I just posted on another thread and this is what I said:
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Generally speaking an HDV tape shot with a Canon camera must be ingested via the Canon camera, neither Sony or JVC decks play back Canon HDV tapes. Unless this has changed that is how it is.As for 24F and 30F modes the thing to know about them is that these were modes developed by Canon to automate the ingest of footage of a 23.98 nature. What happens with 24F mode is that you get a 3:2 cadence of sorts similar to a 29.97 signal with 3:2 pulldown… Except in 24F mode, instead of the interlaced frame you get a duplicate frame, this duplicate frame has a metadata flag on it so that FCP knows to remove it. So on ingest, FCP gets 23.98 automatically. On the tape it is 29.97, but FCP is automatically throwing away the frames that don’t need to be there for a 23.98 signal. In older 24p cameras DVX100, etc you used to have to manually remove these frames via a tool like CinemaTools, etc.
The thing with the 24F mode is that, and I may be wrong, but that pseudo ‘pulldown’ frame is a duplicate of the previous or post frame and not a real interlaced pulldown frame so if you use this as a 29.97 signal your image will actually look stuttery due to the duplicate.
On another note, when you ingest your footage via the camera and the frames are removed look at the clip timecode. The final frame of a second of footage is still ’29’, but it skips 6 counts every second. So it might jump from 23 frames to 25 frames, etc.
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Understanding the concept of 24P and how it used to be used in DVX100 cameras is really the basis of the questions above. If you understand what 24p really is and how that translates to Canon’s use of it in their 24F mode you will be able to determine these settings yourself, not only for this project but all future projects.
Basically, if you’re using FCP you’ll want to choose something like “Easy Setup” HDV 1080P 24F”, but now that is assuming you want to keep working with an HDV sequence which I would recommend, but that’s a different discussion altogether. You may also try out: https://audiovideoproducer.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=188809
I haven’t read it, but it seems informative.
Donovan Kosters
Post Production Supervisor and Workflow Development
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