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DVCPRO50 workflow, 24p, 30i, DVD
I need some help with my output for my short film. I shot on an SDX900 camera on 24p. The camera converts the footage to 30i onto the tape so that I can capture it and use it in Avid Xpress Pro. I captured it at 30i NTSC (the only way it would allow me to capture it) on an Avid Media Composer. (Avid Xpress Pro cannot capture DV50 footage, but you can edit with it.)
I have edited the project in 30i the whole way. Now that we are trying to make DVDs, the quicktimes either produce jagged, sawtooth artifacts when panning or if there is fast motion in the frame. (I had resolved this issue using JES Deinterlacer, but it only made the DVDs somewhat viewable.) When I produced an uncompressed quicktime and a professional encoder worked with it, strobing occurred instead of the sawtoothing. He thinks that I needed to pulldown the 30i raw footage to 24p after capture and I should have edited in 24p in the timeline.
Can anyone help shed some light on this issue and tell me what I should do? Do I have to re-edit the whole thing? Can I convert the program to 24p in the timeline? (I have had an entire sound mix done in ProTools based on the 30i editing).
Thanks!!!
Eric
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5 Replies
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The best quality solution is to reconform your project at 23.976p. You would have the highest quality image as there are 6 less frames per second to compress, as well as no interlacing to deal with = More bandwidth for image quality. You DVD should be authored from a 23.976p Anamorphic Uncompressed QuickTime. The 23.976p QuickTime also makes for much better looking web video.
1) Output an EDL for each layer.
2) Convert the 29.97 EDL to 23.976 using EDLmax 24, a friend with a smoke or flame who can do you a favor, etc.
3) Import the EDL back into the Avid and create a 23.976p Sequence (Good luck getting this to work).
4) Batch capture and remove pulldown on ingest.The audio will be the same as this is not affected by the frame rate of the video. Simply import the final mix and drop it in.
The easy solution is to keep the sequence at 30i and figure out why you see such bad interlace artifacts. You may have a field ordering problem. You should be exporting a Lower Field First QuickTime from the Avid to send to the DVD encoding software (for NTSC projects).
And last, you may have shot using advanced pulldown. This is a good and a bad thing. Good if you were finishing at 24p. Bad… in fact really bad… if you are finishing at 30i. The 2:3:3:2 pulldown cadence was never meant to be used as a final product and will reveal itself as inconsistent and jerky cadence during 30i playback. You must, if you respect the craft in any way, reconform your project at 23.976 by removing the advanced pulldown on capture (see above).
Do not, by any means, deinterlace the project. You are tossing away half the resolution of your image. In addition, it may get rid of “shredding”, but will not solve the cadence issues. Deinterlacing is not a solution and would be considered blasphemy to a great SD camera like the Panasonic SDX900.
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You can make your own 23.976 matchback EDL from EDL Manager:
Michael
Michael Phillips
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I would like to appologize for misleading you into thinking that you could simply bring the 23.976 EDL back into your Avid and batch capture (See #3 in my original post). As I have since discovered, it seems that this is not a workflow that Avid wishes to support.
Yes, you can use matchback to generate a 24p EDL as Michael points out… but beyond that… there is nothing you can do with it on an Avid in SD.
Good luck.
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I share your pain, I used to try and make AVID (Newscutter) edit 24p but AVID would only ingest my footage at 30i which messes the video up upon exporting to a QT ref file.
Here is what I would do now that you already shot it at 24p.
Edit on a AVID 30i time line,
Export from AVID as a QT ref file and import that file into Vegas 8 Pro and make the Vegas timeline 24p and once the QT file is imported into Vegas you change the clip properties (not the Vegas PROJECT timline) to 24p (progressive of course).
That way, your AVID timeline is transformed onto a Vegas Pro 8 24p timeline and then using Vegas encode the timeline to MPEG2 using the progressive widescreen (I assume that is what you shot it at ?).
When burned onto the DVD the DVD player will display the video as 24p.
Patrick
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Okay – I can bring this thread to a quick close. First, thanks to everyone who responded. Second, I did not shoot 24p Advanced. Third, what I ended up doing was using Sorenson Squeeze for the encoding ( a friend of mine has done this a lot and was able to help). Sorenson solved all the problems and I now have a flawless DVD.
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