Editing in FCP with different frame rates

[Bret Williams]

I’m not sure about the RED footage workflow. But in general when I’m dealing with 24p, and 30i formats mixed in the same timeline I use a 60p timeline. I’d use a 30i timeline if FCP would add the correct pulldown but it doesn’t. So I use 60p, then take the result into AE to interlace it into 480i / 1080i. It takes the 60fps and spreads them among 60 fields automagically adding the pulldown. Only caveat is that you can have a cut occur between fields. Always cut on even frames in your 60p timeline and this won’t happen.

[Atticus Culver-rease]

You don’t want to import a bunch of footage with different framerates into FCP and throw them all into the same timeline. Final Cut doesn’t really know how to handle conforming between timebases like that. You’re going to want to decide what framerate you want to edit with and convert everything to that framerate using another application like After Effects or Compressor, then import to FCP.

If you want to stay in a 24p timeline it will be more difficult to convert your 29.97 sources to 24p while maintaining image quality than it would if you added pulldown to your 24p sources and edited in a 29.97 timeline. On the other hand, your 25p stuff will convert to 24p easier than 29.97. So you have to look at how much of each type of footage you have, what your final output needs to be, and decide what the best format to work in is, then convert everything to that.

Another option to look into would be Nattress’s standards conversion plugin, which I believe is supposed to let you work with your original sources and their different framerates within the same timeline, doing the conversion within FCP, but I haven’t worked with it enough to know if it’s up to the task you have.

[Bret Williams]

All good. Working in a 60fps timeline will end up with the same result. It’s the common denominator between 24 and 30fps. And you can work with your original footage. I’m not sure what’s up with the 13fps footage he has and the 25fps (pal?) footage. The 25fps should probably just be conformed with cinema tools to play back at 24, then have pulldown added via your or my method.

The downside of the 60fps method is that with any change, you have to change the 60fps sequence, then run it through the AE interlace process again. (Which is just throwning the 60p QT into a 30i comp in AE)

[Paul Rayner]

So what do you do if you are working with a high frame rate so that you can slow the video down in places and it will still be smooth? Do you have to first slow it down and convert it to 30fps in another application and then bring it into FCP. What if you want part of the clip to be at normal speed, and then slowly fade into slow motion?