Frame Rates

[Kevin Camp]

you can mix the frames rates… the durations of your media will be correct (a 1 minute clip will be a 1 minute clip regardless of the frame rate).

however ae will need to generate frames or skip frames to maintain the duration… so if you drop a 29.97 clip into a 59.94 comp, ae you may see that every other frame is a duplicate. if the 29.97 footage is interlaced and ae is set to separate fields, ae will actually convert your 29.97i footage to 59.94p by using the other field data to generate new frames, which is a cool trick.

if you had a 29.97 comp and dropped it into a 59.94 comp where all movement was key framed (no footage), you shouldn’t see any duplicate frames, ae will be recalculating between keyframes so everything should look smooth…. unless you have checked preserve frame rate in the advanced comp settings tab for that particular comp, but that is not the default, and it would be easy to change.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Andrea Stewart]

Thanks, great answer Kevin. Just what I needed to know.

Now can you answer me this…
The same project requires me to make a PAL version. Besides resizing, what would I need to do to make this conversion? Can I just plop my nested comps into a new PAL 25p comp? Part of this animation has NTSC footage which is time remapped already for some stop action and slow downs. What would I need to know about handling the change to PAL concerning this part of the animation?

Thanks for your insights.

Cheers,
Andrea

Andrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director – Owner
Germane Creative LLC

[Kevin Camp]

for the most part you should be able to drop your comp into a pal comp and resize it to fill the comp… you may want to have the collapse transformations/continuously rasterize option checked to get better scaling for some effects and masks or vector art. note that sometimes the collapse transformation option can do some unexpected things too…

also, for you footage, make sure ae has separated the fields correctly (or it was deinterlaced another way) so you can scale it. if you had ae separate fields, i would try the preserve edges option in the interpret footage window. you can choose to interlace if you want for the output, but that’s just a preference.

as far as the time remapping, i think it should work fine. if something seems abnormal, just post. i’ve actually never tried to time remap something and then change the frame rate later, but i think it should work out ok…

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW