Frame Rate Conform/Convert Problem

[John Heagy]

25fps to 24fps is done all the time and people just live with the slight audio pitch change. 30 to 24 is a problem without doing a proper conversion via Compressor or Episode. If you drop 30i in 24p it will drop 6 frames per second and you will have to de-interlace it… not pretty I’m afraid.

[Rafael August]

Thanks John,

Unfortunately I think thats what I will have to do. I’m sort of backed into a corner with the time and budget constraints. The amount of footage is massive and I just feel it would take way to long to do.

Rafael

[Matt Lyon]

Rafael,

I hate to say this after you have digitized everything, but is there a really good reason you needed to upconvert ALL your footage?

In this situation I would have used an offline/online workflow:

Edit your show with all your material captured in their native frame rate/resolutions, with burn in timecode (to ease the conform).

Lock your picture, then recapture/upconvert/standards convert, JUST the program content. Recapture using handles, to allow for massaging of the edits.

Budget permitting, I would even take this job to a proper online facility, where they can do proper hardware based frame rate conversions.

Since you’ve already captured all your footage, you can still edit in a mixed frame rate timeline, then convert your PROGRAM footage (with handles) AFTER locking picture, to spare yourself the CPU cycles. Allow yourself a couple days to do the conform.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Shane Ross]

Do you want to do it RIGHT, or do it WRONG? You can apologize to the powers that be that they gave you all this footage that needed to be converted, and didn’t give you enough time to do it right. If they want it done right, they need to give you more time. If they want you to start right away…you can. But the footage won’t look good, up to them.

The proper way is to use a Terranex box to do this in real time. But that’s expensive. So you are limited to Compressor, which takes time. Cinema Tools is not the tool to convert the frame rate. It conforms the frame rate, making things faster, or slower, depending on the way you go. You need to use COMPRESSOR that will keep things the same speed, but remove, or add, the proper frames in the proper way, if you use the proper settings.

Yes, this will take time. This is what happens when the decision was made to shoot with the wrong camera format. If they want PAL, they should have shot PAL. If the NTSC footage is B-Roll or stock footage to be used in a show, then time needs to be alotted to convert this footage properly.

Or, they live with it looking bad.

Cheap – Fast – Good. Pick two.

Shane

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[Rafael August]

Thank you guys for your suggestions.

Matt, the reason why I upconverted everything first was the producer wanted to do it for archive purposes. I was going to have to recapture everything anyways because this is a project that originated on Sony Vegas and I am taking it to FCP.

Shane, I would like to do it the correct way and I will try to convince them that it’s the best way to go. I have a couple of questions about my final steps in compressor.

1. To change the frame rate I first select the video settings button from the second tab in the inspector and change it to custom 23.98? Then from the third menu I turn on frame controls, set resize to best, output fields to Progressive and deinterlace to best. With rate conversion to best and duration to 100%?

2. With frame rates of 29.97, 25 and 23.98 I am choosing 23.98 as common rate. Right now the only planned delivery is a Blu Ray DVD for festivals. Everything has been up-converted to ProRes 1080i. With a Sequence setting of HDTV1080i and rate of 23.98 what does this mean for progressive material. Does it become PSF once it’s dropped into the timeline? I am unclear what happens to progressive material once it’s dropped into a 1080i23.98 project.

Thank you all again. Happy Holidays,

Rafael