Conforming 60p to 24p

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Nate,

It would be best to go through AE first using this plugin.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Nate Hanson]

Hi Vince,

I have the plugin and I’ve watched Kramer’s tutorial on that. I’m wondering what the advantage is in this case.

I can see how if you are going UP from 24p to 30p, After Effects would be combining frames to generate new ones to fill the gaps. But if I’m going down from 60p to 24p, I don’t need to generate any frames, right?

It seems to me that Premiere just has to play the frames one frame at a time…just at a slower rate. Am I missing something?

Footage is from a Canon T2i in case that matters.

Thanks for any input,

Nate Hanson
Pilothouse Films

[Nathan Hamblin]

Hey Nate,

I own CS4, in my “Project Window” I right click on the footage and click “Interpret Footage”, and put 23.97 in place of 60p. It works great for me.

Nathan Hamblin
nathanhamblin.us

[Nathan Hamblin]

Never mind, I was testing it and realized it didn’t work…. maybe the solution is putting 60p footage into a 24p timeline and slowing it down manually

Nathan Hamblin
nathanhamblin.us

[Nate Hanson]

I created a 24p sequence and dropped my 60p footage into it – looks fantastic. Smooth and slow.

However, I have been advised to do frame rate conversions in After Effects. I can see why this is important when going UP to 60p from 24p because frames need to be created in order to achieve a smooth looking video.

But if you are converting DOWN to 24p, all you need to do is play the same frames at a slower rate – nothing needs to be created. So it makes sense to me that simply dropping 60p footage into a 24p sequence would be fine. I’d love confirmation of that from a pro if anybody has the answer.

Nate Hanson
Pilothouse Films

[Nathan Hamblin]

I found this, maybe the original thing I said does work, this is for After Affects, but should be the same in Premiere, https://vimeo.com/12145675

Nathan Hamblin
nathanhamblin.us

[Nate Hanson]

Thanks for that link – very helpful in terms of workflow for the conversion!

Nate Hanson
Pilothouse Films

[Casey Culver]

I’m not sure about previous versions of Premiere Pro, but in CS6 you can highlight multiple clips in your project window, right click, and select Speed/Duration – if you’ve shot in 60P and want to change it to 24P, that would be exactly 40%. You can change Speed/Duration in your timeline, but by doing it in your project window, you get to change multiple clips at once, preview your clips in slowmo, and drag ‘n drop slowmo clips with in and out points directly into the timeline – saving time if you’re using multiple slowmo clips.

You can make your slowmo slower by going with a percent lower than 40 or not as slow by going with a higher percentage. An important note though, if you go below 40%, you might start to notice a flickering effect where it doesn’t have that smooth look as it does at 40%/24P. This happens because you’re eye is capable of seeing the individual frames once you introducing less than 24 frames per second.

If you do your conversion in After Effects, the process will take many times longer and you also lose your audio sync, which doesn’t happen with the above method. Plus with AE, you might have to wait hours for all the clips to be rendered – costing you time and disc space – while doing in Premiere, it will take seconds! Also, unlike the fella says in the vimeo link, using twixtor does not give you a better conversion when dropping to 40%/24p. Twixtor is a program designed for dropping to much lower percentages – like 5%, which will look like garbage if you do it in PP or AE without a plugin like twixtor.

Another note – unlike Apple’s Cinema Tools, this does not change the actual file, it only changes the clip in your PP project.

There was another question about dropping a 60P clip into a 24P timeline – this will not turn your clip slowmo automatically, it will still be in real time.