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Converting 25p to 29.97 or 59.94 fps for broadcast
Good evening everyone
I’ve just registered on the forum to try and get advice on a tricky situation I’ve managed to get myself into. I have browsed trough Creative Cows forum in the past to find solutions to problems but this time round there seems to be a lot of confusing discussions with no definite answers to the issue that I have, so I decided to start a new thread and hope someone has some good advice to offer.
I’m based in South Africa which is PAL country and have been filming our broadcast projects in 25p on the advice of our distribution agents in Europe as all the channels they deal with prefer their HD acquisitions in either 25p or 24p. Projects we’ve had to deliver to the US have easily been conformed from 25p to 24p and the format also worked perfectly for DVD and BlueRay authoring and delivery in both US and European markets.
We spend 6 months last year in Mozambique filming a 13 part half hour series that was destined for a channel in the US that accepts delivery in 24p, but as usual Murphy decided to get on board and the channel ended up merging with another and all projects got placed on hold.
I received confirmation last week to proceed with post production from the new channel accompanied with a new spec sheet and its here that things hit the fan.
Their specifications requires delivery to be in HD, various codecs are accepted with a minimum 4:2:2 50 Mbps requirement. All good and well until they mentioned that they only accept 1920 x 1080, 29.97 or 59.94 fps and under no circumstances accept delivery in 24p. They also stated that they prefer projects NOT be shot at 24p… too late for that!!!
Even tough the channel only accepts programming in HD format, they down convert the HD episodes for airing to NTSC 525/29.97 drop frame, so still broadcasting in SD with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
No doubt this is going to be challenging for both me and my team, but there’s no way around it and I need to look at the best solutions available to do the conversions.
Does anyone have experience converting 24p to 29.97 fps for broadcast?
Conforming from 25p to 24p in Cinema Tools is not an issue but its the next step that has me worried. We are still editing with FCP 7 but considering to finally make the jump to FCP X. Obviously at this point I’m open to all suggestions to get the best possible results even if it means acquiring new hardware or software.
The series does have a fair amount of graphics and animations and I’m thinking it might be better to insert them after converting to 29.97 for the smoothest results.
Any advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Didi Schoeman
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5 Replies
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I have had to make 24p 29.97 for broadcast and Compressor does a great job. Default settings never worked for me. This is a great article that will help: https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/converting_frame_rates_compressor.html
Best of luck.Stephen Smith – Follow me on Behance
Check out my Motion Training DVD
Check out my Vimeo page
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Thanks a million Stephen!
I feel a lot better about it now that I’ve read Ken’s article… Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.
Did you add motion graphics and titling after converting to 29.97 or before? My gut feeling tells me to add them after the conversion to ensure smooth motion, but maybe I’m over reacting…
Thanks again
Didi
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Happy to help. I have done it both ways and it seems to work. I imagine that adding the graphics latter at 29.97 would be better but I never did any side by side comparisons.
Stephen Smith – Follow me on Behance
Check out my Motion Training DVD
Check out my Vimeo page
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Thanks Stephen, I owe you big time!
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Happy to help and best of luck.
Stephen Smith – Follow me on Behance
Check out my Motion Training DVD
Check out my Vimeo page
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