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Cinema Tools Bug? Also, A Black and Red Question…
Hi There,
I have two questions which are unrelated to each other but concern issues that have remained unsolved for me for some time.
The first issue is something that happens when batch conforming in cinema tools during NTSC to PAL or vice versa, conversions. My current method of converting a show (24 minutes of animation done in PAL) is to first export out of final cut and just change the size of the image using QuickTime conversion from 720X576 to 720X486 and then batch conform the new clip from 25 fps to 23.98 using cinema tools.
However, there is a bug which you probably already know about – cinema tools will insert the first frame (or few frames) of picture around the three minute and ten second-ish mark when batch conforming from 23.98 to 25 fps or from 25 to 23.98 fps. My work around has been to re-export the scene with bad frames, batch conform it on it’s own, and cut it in over the bad frames.
Is there a better way of dealing with this issue? Other than the bad frame problem, I like the results for my conversion as there are no video issues to speak of and the clients can live with the slightly lower pitched audio in the NTSC version – and we get around the minute of added time by using an opening and closing that are half as long (30 secs each) as the PAL version.
The second problem I have is related to the way certain colours (Canadian spelling at work) behave – particularly in an anamorphic format (at least I think that’s what’s exaggerating the problem I’m experiencing). The problem is this: our main character sports a bright red jacket which is outlined and detailed with fine black lines – these colours do not seem to like sharing pixels with each other and our anamorphic delivery format isn’t helping matters at all.
A little more background for you about our process at the moment. Our show is animated in Flash, with backgrounds coming from Photoshop and additional elements produced in Maya along with various fx and compositing done in After Effects. We export out of Flash at the size the clips are worked on (PAL 16X9 – 1024X576) using the compression set to “None”. We’ve found this gets us the best results out of Flash, which we discovered does a fairly horrible job at either compressing or changing the size of a clip. Then we re-export the clips using QuickTime Pro to compress the footage to 10-bit Uncompressed, changing the size to 720X576 PAL anamorphic. So far, this gives us the best quality standard def – in the range of what we’ve seen in our process.
Any thoughts, suggestions, comments you have would be most appreciated!
Best,
Geoff
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1 Reply
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Hi Geoff,
You my try the Nattress “Map Frames”. It makes a “conform footage” in the FC time-line.
You drop your PAL footage in the NTSC sequence and drop the filter in the footage.
Rafael
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