Hot mess with mixed frames 60i 60p and 23.98

[Bruno Toré]

Thank you so much for your quick reply Dave!

Originally the delivery was supposed to be 23.98, by now I have heard different things from client but lets stick to 23.98 as the 60i delivery would be only for an excerpt of the video that might be broadcast.

Im going to share my workaround with you, perhaps you will find it silly, but it has produced the best results so far, as I had the issue of turning 60i into convincing 23,98, plus I was trying to keep the same length on the clips because I already had a cut and wanted to try and keep that cut which had been approved by everyone. Either way this is what I figured out that worked for delivery on that format:

First off I should mention that I figured this out thanks to a combination of two posts mentioning Twixtor as viable possibility one of which was by you Dave.

“I recommend using a third-party plugin like Twixtor to convert the 1080 29.97 footage — the same thing as 1080 60i, y’know — into 23.976. Do individual shots, not an hour-long clip or something stupid like that.”

This combined with an article on how twixtor does its “magic” gave me a hunch it was a viable option, but really it was just a Hail Mary on my part as I didnt fully grasp the concept at the time.

First I created a new timeline in FCP (23,98) I then match framed all the 23,98 clips on the 60i sequence and moved them to the new sequence.
For the remaining clips (60i), I exported just what was being used on the timeline as a self contained .mov and took each one of them to AE and inside AE I used a mixture of Composition settings changes, and Twixtor.

These two things allowed me to not only keep the same length on the clips (plus/minus one frame) it also produced convincing 23.98 looking footage, I did add the tiniest possible amount of motion blur in twixtor, I was worried about this but it worked out great.
So things look alikeish and everything including the singers synch performances remained synched.

The one thing that still baffles me is why was the 60i footage the one with pixelation and stuttering issues if it was being exported from a 60i sequence? I expected issues with the 23.98 footage coming out of that sequence but it was the opposite…

[Bruno Toré]

Your Cristal Ball tends to be good but this time its off. I could see the problems on both the Flanders video monitor and on my computer monitor, granted both showed different issues with the same export but still wierd that the video monitor would also have weird pixelation and crazy colored line issues…

Thanks for your help, for now I think Twixtor will be fine, in the future I will have to tackle these camera blunders when I first get the footage not after. My bad, I knew it was gonna bite me in the end just not sure what actually bit me yet, still doesent make sense to me that its the 60i footage thats giving me problems since I am exporting form the right sequence settings for the 60i footage.

Oh well…

Thanks for the advice!