Convert 29.97 fps to 25 fps in Sony Vegas Pro 12

[Lewis Costin]

Hi Ciarán,

Unfortunately there is no easy fix – well, technically there is no “fix”. The bottom line is if you’re wanting something to look professional, shooting everything in the same (or compatible) frame rate at the beginning is one of the first things you should take care of.

There are a few ways of “fixing” your problem, depending on what you’re willing to change. You could conform the 29.97 footage to simply play back at the slower 25fps, giving you longer clips and audio that would also need to be slowed down or run out of sync. If you don’t need the audio from the camera or any kind of sync audio, I would recommend this method as it is the only way to avoid any artifacts that you may not be happy with.

You’ll probably have to conform your footage with an external tool because as far as I know Vegas annoyingly doesn’t have an “interpret footage” setting.

The other 2 ways are bleeding the frames (what Vegas is doing) or dropping the frames (which leads to jerkiness and I think can be done in the clip properties in Vegas – “disable resample?”).

There is some other method of doing the conversion that I have heard of but never tried. It involves converting from 29.97 to 23.976 first, then going to 25. Sounds complicated to me and I probably wouldn’t bother, but I have heard it nets decent results.

[Ciarán Hickey]

Hey there Lewis thanks for your quick reply!

The handy business with these files is that I do not require the audio from them, so I went with the first solution. To be completely honest, that was my inkling in the first place but I just didn’t know how to do it.
What I did do (for the sake of anybody else who stumbles upon this post with the exact same problem) was go into the properties of the clip on the Timeline and change the Undersample Rate of the 29.97 fps clips from 1.000 to 0.835. This brought it down to 25fps in terms of playback. I rendered out the individual clips under the same setting I’m rendering out the rest of the film in (25fps settings) and the result was perfect – no frame bleeding whatsoever. Flawless. The slow down was so minimal that, without audio to draw attention to it, visually it was hardly noticeable, so got lucky there! So crisis averted.

It was very unprofessional of me to assume the Kodak would be shooting at 25 fps in the first place, it was only when I had it on the computer did the File Properties notify me the clips were of 29.97 fps. But it all seems fine now.

Thanks again Lewis 🙂

[Lewis Costin]

Glad that worked out for you : )

[Colin Basterfield]

Hi there,

This is exactly what I was looking for. I use Video Blocks, but live in New Zealand so my cam is only capable of 50i, 50p or 25p. I can appaprently change a setting to do 24p, but it requires reformatting of the memory card, and then it might play on NTSC TV’s, apparently.

I’ve used your process already and it, as you found out, does the trick.

Many thanks for sharing.
Colin

[Joanne Bouzianis-sellick]

Hi, can you suggest a fix for me, I have footage I shot on a cheap little sports camera at 30fps. I am trying desperately to get it to import into my Vegas Movie Studio 9 and only the sound will import not the footage. I need to convert to 25fps so I can drop it into the timeline of what I already have and I have been trawling for help on the net most of the night and have just found your post and it is recent too. I have downloaded converters and the likes and it still not working. Argh!!! it is driving me nuts.