Editing DVCPro HD 59.94 / 23.98 together in same sequence?

[Sean Oneil]

[rose glandfield] “The sequence has a timebase of 23.98, and the bulk of the footage is shot at that rate, the problematic stuff is the extra footage I’ve captured at 59.94 and the Pal / 25 P footage.

At the moment, I’ve just captured both the Pal and HDCam as DV Pal and am able to edit them straight into my sequence at that frame rate – do these and the 59.94 need converting before I transfer the project or will the frame rate be converted simply by dropping them into the sequence?
“

Putting the PAL footage in a 23.98 sequence is fine. FCP 6 automatically will slow it down for you. You’ll know this is happening if you see a green bar within the audio clips. Personally I like to conform it first in Cinema Tools, but it doesn’t really matter.

I’m a little unclear about the 59.94. Was that footage actually shot at 59.94, or was it shot at 23.98 like the other stuff but you accidentally captured at 59.94? I’m assuming it’s the latter, right?

Sean

[Rose Glandfield]

[Sean ONeil] “‘m a little unclear about the 59.94. Was that footage actually shot at 59.94, or was it shot at 23.98 like the other stuff but you accidentally captured at 59.94? I’m assuming it’s the latter, right?”

Yep, that’s right. I had real trouble getting FCP to see the video, although it had no problem controlling the deck. After about 6 hours of trying various different permutations of deck settings and FCP easy setups, the only setting FCP seemed to accept was to capture the 23.98 footage at 59.94.

I didn’t think it’d be a problem until I tried to make a multicam group using that and some other footage captured at 23.98 and it wouldn’t let me. I think I’m going to convert the footage I need to multigroup using the Panasonic frame rate converter – am I right in thinking I can cut the rest of it straight into the timeline then render it?

[Sean Oneil]

I think you should create new 23.98 media then. Put the footage on a 23.98 sequence (like discussed before) and make the sequence’s timecode match that of the clip. So if the clip starts at 01:00:00:00, make the sequence start at the same. Don’t worry if the timebase is different (one is 24 the other 60). The seconds will still match up and that’s fine.

Then export Quicktime Movie, self-contained. Import that new file back into Final Cut. You now have 23.98 footage. Problem solved.

Sean

[Todd Faulkner]

I’ve been wrestling with this very problem. We shot 720 24p footage, but it captured to a Firestore at 60p (it was a new piece of equipment and we were still figuring it out). In addition, on some days I did not get the “reference movie” and had all of my takes broken up into clips that all equalled 2 minutes and 18 seconds.

The 60p video plays 24 frames per second if you drop it in a 24p timeline, but for some reason, FCP doesn’t always drop the correct frames in the timeline (many takes come across as if they were 12p). So it looks stuttery. And there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which takes are affected.

My solution was to arrange the footage in the timeline by location/scene, and then convert the video on the clips to 24p using the DVCPro frame rate converter — I then replaced the 60p video with the new 24p version (with properly synched audio) and output all of the footage into full quality DVCPro HD master scene clips. That’s what I’ll edit my project from.

Admittedly, it’s a bit of a work-around, but playback is smooth and gorgeous (and it looks to me like any loss in resolution is negligible).