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Conforming 50fps material within Avid Media Composer
Hi All,
I’m an FCP switcher, hoping to move over almost entirely to Avid Media Composer over the next 12 months or so. I’ve had the software for about a month now, and in this time I’ve been getting stuck in and getting to grips with it.
Inevitably many aspects of working with Avid are different from FCP, and there have been some workflow changes to get my head around. Generally I’m pretty confident with these now, but there are a couple things that I knew how to do with Final Cut, which I don’t know the best practise for in Avid.
One of these is conforming clips shot at higher frame rates for smoother slo-mo (for the work I do, this will usually be 50fps material recorded on the 5D). Within FCP, my workflow for this is to conform the clips in question to 25fps with Cinema Tools, and then transcode those conformed files to which ever flavour of ProRes I’m using for the project.
For now, to achieve similar with Avid I have continued conforming in Cinema Tools, and then imported these clips in Avid, transcoding to DNXHD. It works – but my question is, is there an Avid-only workflow I can use which wouldn’t involve Cinema Tools?
My reasoning is, I’m currently sticking with Snow Leopard, but eventually I’ll have to upgrade my OSX and at some point Cinema Tools is bound to stop working (going on Apple’s record for this kind of thing). I also like to use as few applications as possible as a general rule, so if there’s a way I can achieve the same thing solely within Avid I’d love to know how.
Thanks in advance…
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5 Replies
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I wish there was an alternative to Cinema Tools, but for now it’s the best option as far as I know. In the past I’ve used a manual workaround that Mark Burton from the UK came up with:
https://community.avid.com/forums/p/67016/375329.aspx#375329Most cams that can overcrank can have both an actual shooting frame rate (50fps in your case) and a base frame rate. Meaning that you would be able to set the base rate to 25, then shoot at 50. The resulting clip would then be a 25fps slow motion clip.
With the DSLR’s, you’ll need tricks like Cinema Tools. Again, would love to see someone make a simple cross-platform version of Cinema Tools.
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P.S. I forgot to mention there are in fact two ways to force frame rates in Avid.
For traditional File->Import there is a console command that lets you import QT files on a frame-by-frame basis. You open the Console (CMD-6), then type ‘IgnoreQTRate True’ (and ‘Ignore QTRate False’ to disable the feature). Mind you, this ONLY works on QT files without audio tracks; as soon as there is audio, the audio sample rate will prevail.
When AMA-linking, there is a similar command ‘SetAMAQTForcedFrameRate true 25.000’ (or any other frame rate). This will force AMA’s QT files to run at the rate you specify. This also works on clips that have sound BUT the sound itself is not adjusted and will therefore run out of sync. The other issue is that the total clip length is determined by the original clip. So for a 50fps clip, only the first half of that clip will appear when slow-mo’ed.
So again, Cinema Tools is the easiest.
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I believe QTChange from VideoToolshed can change the frame rate in the QT header.
https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/42/qtchange
Michael
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Thought so too, but I never got it to work.
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Thanks for the replies guys, much appreciated. I guess the best bet is to continue running clips through Cinema Tools for now until a better solution comes along.
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