Hey Jeremy – P2 24p & 29.97 mixed timeline question

[Jeremy Garchow]

Hi Brett.

[Bret Williams] “16:9 29.97 480p footage. “

Is this 30p or 24P with pulldown?

[Bret Williams] “Before reading your thread I tried mixing the two in a 24p timeline (with hopes of making an actual 24p DVD) but the 29.97 stuff looked horrible”

Yeah, FCP doesn’t do a real nice job of this kind of workflow. Adjusting the footage outside of FCP and bringing it back in is always the best solution.

[Bret Williams] “So I found your thread and swapped the timeline to 59.97.”

That’s 59.94 🙂

[Bret Williams] “Did I do this right?”

Sounds good. You could have just made a new sequence with the 720p 59.94 preset and pasted the new clips in to there. Your 24p footage will now have progressive 3:2 pulldown added to it (3 dupes, then 2 dupes, this is totally normal and acceptable) and if your 480 footage was 30p (and not 24p with pulldown) you should see 2:2 pulldown in that every frame is duplicated. Is that what you have?

The other method is to conform all 480 material to 24p 720 using COmpressor, but I would leave that up to you and it is a conform, meaning new pixels will be made. Using the 720p59.94 timeline, there’s no conformed/warped pixels, just new duplicate frames. Hope that makes sense.

If your 480 footage is 24p with pulldown, post back.

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

But the big question, how do I now go to DVD?

And, ah yes, the 16:9 was regular old SD 30p. Not sure what it was shot on, but didn’t have any fields. 29.97 I guess actually. I’m sure they just used frame or movie mode or progressive or whatever. We were just given the media files from another company.

I tried using compressor to convert the 29.97 to 24 and that was not good. Not to mention it wanted to take 15minutes for each 30 sec clip or so. The compression times were horrible.

A quick trick I found useful, only because our 29.97 stuff was just jib arm beauty shots, was to open them in cinema tools and conform them to play back at 24. Then then looked in beautiful in a 24p sequence of course. But if you had an interview or something, this wouldn’t do.

I also had the problem of scaling up the SD to HD. Compressor stunk at this. FCP stunk at this. The matrox mini does a great job of this from the canvas to the LCD, but once you drop the clip in the timeline, the job gets handed over to FCP. UGH. The best answer by far is After Effects. It’s scaling engine is the best by far and it only takes a few seconds to render each clip. I also put a little sharpening on each shot and a little “instant sex” tiny glow ala Trish and Chris Meyer. The result is a shot that is very very close to it’s HD counterparts.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Bret Williams] “But the big question, how do I now go to DVD? “

I have an HD to Sd preset for MPEG2 in Compressor. You will make a 29.97 MPEG2 and your 24p footage will be 24p with 3:2 pulldown and your 30p footage will be 30p SD.

You can start with a 16×9 preset, but then turn on Frame controls and use Best for Resize filter, deinterlacing set to fast (for proper segmenting) output fields to lower. Rate conversion can be left at fast.

make sense?

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

So I guess the pulldown over 60 frames will now occur over 60 fields? IOW the 3232 will end up looking like a mixture of progressive and interlaced frames, correct? Otherwise seems like it would be all for not.

Bret Williams
Web Design . Motion Graphics . Video Editing
http://www.bretwilliams.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

The beauty of 60p, is that it will translate to 29.97i perfectly. Each p frame gets mapped to one i field.

So in 60p, 24p with 3:2 pulldown (that’s progressive pulldown remember) will get mapped to 24p with interlaced 3:2 pulldown in 29.97.

30p over 60p will get mapped to 30psf in 29.97 timebases.

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

Like the old days when the 3D animators couldn’t render in fields, so I had them render as 60fps, then in AE I dropped it into a 30fps timeline and AE would interlace the two.

Maybe you don’t remember those AE 3.x days or the days of Media 100 version 2 & 3.

[Jeremy Garchow]

That is the very same principle exactly.

[Bret Williams]

I ran a test DVD and everything 24p looked great and smooth, but the 29.97 material definitely has it’s fields reversed.

You said to use “lower” in your Compressor specs, but they called it top and bottom field. I used bottom. That right? If so, why would the fields be reversed in my 29.97 content (which actually never had fields to begin with)?

Brain hurt. Ow.

Thanks for your advice!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Bret Williams] “That right? If so, why would the fields be reversed in my 29.97 content (which actually never had fields to begin with)? “

Ah, totally forgot to tell you about this and sorry for that.

Do me a favor. In your browser, take a look at what is listed under the field dominance column. Is it lower first? Yes, lower is bottom. 🙂

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

For the SD footage? My timeline is made up of 24p and 29.97. The SD 29.97 stuff is anamorphic. Came from an Avid, and was run through compressor to make it all pro res hq. 720×486 Upper.

And actually, I’m looking at the DVD again and I was viewing it as letterbox. When I turn off the letterbox and watch it raw, I don’t see the interlacing or waving. I think it was just the field mush created when my DVD player squeezed it into the letterbox. Since the 24p only had fields every 4th or 5th framee, it wasn’t noticeable when it was squeezed into the letterbox I guess.