Capturing DVCPro HD with dropped frames

[Jeremy Garchow]

Capture them all as 720p60.

Jeremy

[Scott Stolzar]

Sorry I was not clear. All of the tapes have been captured already and 3 are 23.98 and 7 are 59.94. Although there has been an interesting development. I’ll do my best to say this clearly.

I captured the tail end of a tape that I had missed due to a timecode break (sloppy I know). The original tape was captured with an AJ-HD1400 that was hooked into the iMac’s firewire, while the external drive was hooked up to a USB. The deck settings 720p and the framerate was 59.94 and FCP was set up to the DVCPro HD 720p24 Easy Setup. It was captured as 720p60 (59.94 fps). I chalked this up to the camera crew. Today, when I captured that last section of this tape using the same deck settings and FCP easy setup, it was captured at 720p24 (23.98 fps). The only thing that I changed was that I captured straight to the iMac’s HD through the firewire (taking advice that I had gotten here).

Hopefully I have been clear. Anyway, I’m trying to figure out why the pulldown wasn’t done when I first captured the tape. My theory is that it has something to do with the fact that the first time the scratch disk was connected with a USB, which might have interfered with Final Cut doing the pulldown. Can someone either confirm or offer another explanation as to why that is?

Thank you
Scott

[Jeremy Garchow]

No, you simply removed pulldown when you captured the 23.98 footage.

At any rate, I’d edit in a 59.94 timeline and all will be good.

Jeremy

[Scott Stolzar] “I’m trying to figure out why the pulldown wasn’t done when I first captured the tape.”

Sounds like you have something incorrectly set.

[Scott Stolzar]

Can you point me in the right direction as to what might have been set wrong the first time that it didn’t do the pull down?

The deck was set to 720p and the frame rate was 59.94. The easy set-up was set to DVCPro HD 720p24. What else needs to be set? And as I said before, when I did the initial capture some were captured at 720p24 and some at 720p60, with no discernible pattern. I don’t want to make whatever mistake I made again in the future.

Thank you

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Scott Stolzar] “Can you point me in the right direction as to what might have been set wrong the first time that it didn’t do the pull down?”

I think that when you thought you were set to 23.98, you weren’t.

The footage on the tape does not have 23.98 flags, easy to check on the user bits of the deck.

You tried to capture one big tape without logging and capturing separate clips and in that process captured some of the bars from the beginning of the tape, which will throw off FCP.

You forgot to reset an easy setup.

You forgot to do a test capture and check.

There’s many reasons.

Jeremy

[Scott Stolzar]

“You tried to capture one big tape without logging and capturing separate clips and in that process captured some of the bars from the beginning of the tape, which will throw off FCP.”

I think that is the one. All of the initial capturing was one in one setting with no restarts and no quitting FCP so the set-up shouldn’t have changed. I had done a capture test for the first tape which captured with all of the right settings. I skipped all of the color bars for that tape and captured it as a whole and it was 23.98. When I look at the ones that are 23.98, none have color bars, while the ones that do have color bars are all 59.94. Can you explain why that is?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Because the bars don’t have flagged frame information, so there’s nothing for FCP to grab onto. Once the capture starts, it continues at what it thinks is best and can’t change frame rates in the middle of a capture.

Jeremy

[Scott Stolzar]

Huh. Is that an issue with Avid as well?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Scott Stolzar] “Huh. Is that an issue with Avid as well?”

It’s not an NLE issue, it’s how the bars are recorded to tape. It’s a Panasonic ‘issue’.

The rules: capture bars separate, and log and capture, i.e. don’t rip in the whole tape.