Conforming 24fps to 25fps

[Tom Wolsky]

Normally DVD players will play back 24fps. The adjustment is done on output. If you really want to do it you can try using Cinema Tools to conform it. You’ll have to adjust the audio speed as well, which you can do in Soundtrack Pro.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Neil Sadwelkar]

You have to have a PAL DVD, so you need your program to be at 25 fps.

You can export your finished timeline as a QuickTime self-contained movie with audio, which will be naturally 24fps. This can be conformed to 25 fps in CinemaTools where even the audio will be adjusted for length. Or course the audio will run 4% faster and hence slightly lifted in pitch too. If there’s music it’s tempo will be 4% faster.

You can take the 24 fps audio separately to Soundtrack pro and adjust it to 4% faster without any pitch shift. But the tempo of music will be 4% fast and that’s unavoidable.

24fps movies have always been made to PAL DVDs this way.

In the NTSC world, they treat the 24fps original film source as 23.976 fps and then add 6 frames to make up 29.97 fps NTSC video with no change in audio tempo (but a minuscule 0.1% speed decrease which is not noticeable).

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Bouke Vahl]

Neil,
The NTSC route is not quite as you describe.
(For the OP as well), you need to slow down to 23.976, and make an MpegII from that.
Imported assets in the authoring package (i suspect DVD SP) now will show the asset if it was 29.97
The player will add the pulldown (6 extra frames) if needed.

The 24 to 25 routine is indeed a very common way, but there is no real need to go to 25, as over here about 99% of the players will play NTSC / 23.976 discs just fine.

(I’ve did a very large project with 25 fps scanned film, intended for international sale. I worked the other way around, slowed down 25 to 23.976, scaled to 720 x 480 to avoid double authoring / mastering / warehouse costs)

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pros

[Rafael Amador]

Yeah.
All Hollywood films are released in all around the World as NTSC DVDs.
No problems in PAL land.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Bouke and Rafael,

I’m aware that DVD Players in most parts of the world, even PAL countries can play NTSC. But the original poster asked how to convert a 24fps source to 25 fps, since he wanted a PAL DVD.

Here in India too, all our 24fps movies get made into NTSC DVDs for worlwide sales, even in the UK. Very rarely, we get some EU customers who demand true PAL (25fps) DVDs. In that case I use the method I described. The sound team supply me the 25fps pitch corrected sound.

The tempo variation I described is a real issue as our films have songs and dances that look visibly faster in tempo.

For NTSC DVDs from 24fps, I usually simply use Compressor to convert 24 to NTSC and it does just fine. I only run into some trouble doing the timecode translation in the subtitle STL, but my friend Kiel has sorted that out, and I too have some Excel scripts to handle that conversion.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Michael Freedman]

Just wanted to say thanks for all the advice. I conformed the QT to 25fps using cinema tools and then did a time stretch in Soundtrack pro without any pitch difference. You can hardly tell the difference.

Many thanks!

Michael F