FCPX Frame Rate Issue

[Darren Roark]

The jittery and less than stellar motion you are seeing is due to some of your source material is at 29.97. If you have footage that was shot 23.98 with a pulldown, adding that 29.97 footage to a 23.98 will remove frames every second you would normally want.

Hopefully that explains it. In other words, stick to 29.97 if you have anything with that frame rate. It will look the same on a dvd but without the stuttery video.

I would invest in Cinematize for ripping clips off of dvds. It’s really simple to use and converts directly to prores at proper framrates. It even makes files with the correct aspect ratio automatically.

I found this here:

https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0.4/

[Marc D’amour]

Darren,

Thanks for the reply.

So in your experience transcoding stuff that originates in 23.976 to 29.97… does the transfer that direction not introduce any stuttering motion or jitters in the footage?

The interesting thing for the purposes of this project is that the all of the 23.976 footage ingested into FCPX is improperly displaying it’s frame rate. I don’t understand “frame rate flags” but my searches to correct this problem produce those search results often. The other very puzzling thing here is that some of the footage that is jittery in the output string actually originated at 23.976 (after ingesting it displays a crazy 24.15 or something). Although the 29.97 stuff is jittery as well, some 23.976 stuff just doesn’t play smooth.

I used Cinematize in the past but I don’t think they take .mkv files which is typically the format I have the footage in. I’ll have to check this latest release.

Thanks very much for the reply.

[Darren Roark]

I think I have a better grip on what’s going on with your issue now.

You should make yourself familiar with codecs and container files. Anything you bring into a NLE should have been transcoded to something that has a proper framerate cadence. Final Cut Pro X has a way of adjusting framerates of mixed source material but not if they are end user viewing codecs/wrappers.

That said, what I meant was, you should always work with a project that has the highest framerate of your clips. IE if that is 29.97 then that is what the project should be. In some cases that would actually be 59.97 if for example you were working with HDV 1080i.

The easiest way to do this in X is, make a project, then put any clip that has the highest frame rate in the project, then you can ad the lesser frame rate clips and FCPX will adjust them automatically.

[Marc D’amour]

Thanks Darren. I appreciate this response. Have you seen any problems with FCPX “improperly reporting” the frame rate of the footage like I mentioned? It sounds like this might be a bug unrelated to my problem and based on what you have reported, not what is causing the stuttering or jittery motion in my output.

[Marc D’amour]

One real quick followup here… so if I have all my clips and many are 23.976 but a handful are 29.97… I should drop the 29.97 to have FCPX create the timeline settings based on that clip and then subsequently add the 23.976 files. That is clear. Will I encounter problems with stuttering or jittery footage though if FCPX is converting all those 23.976 frame rate files to conform to the timeline setting of 29.97?

I appreciate your help!

[Marc D’amour]

Or should I convert everything in a program like Handbrake. Right now I’m using Handbrake to convert the MKV files I take from the source DVD to M4V files for use in FCPX. I have the option in Handbrake to change the Framerate (if the source is 23.976 I can make it 29.97 in Handbrake) or is my best plan to use FCPX to handle the conversion from 23.976 to 29.97.

Again… thanks!