Is it possible to do intra-frame editing in FCP5? (Not an HDV issue.)

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

I’m not sure that I have understood your question. Are you saying that you want to take an individual frame and extract one of it’s two fields? If so, that’s not going to be possible as the two fields are captured as one frame. We would have to write different drivers to perform field-based capture rather than the normal frame-based capture.

Is that what you wanted to know? Something else you might find useful is the FrameLink utility included with the DeckLink 5.0 drivers. This will enable you to drag and drop a QuickTime movie on to FrameLink which will then mount the QuickTime movie as if it was a disk full of DPX frames. You can then edit the individual DPX frames, or add and delete frames, and then immediately playback the result in FCP and you will see the modified movie.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Smoked Meat]

Luke,

Thanks for your quick reply.

Let me be clearer: the project I’ll be working on involves reducing an already-complete four-hour film down to a three-hour film. The D-Betas are sourced from film transfers done at 24fps. The sound mix for the 3 hour version already exists. In cutting the three-hour version picture, I am concerned about not being able to make smooth picture cuts between shots without chopping off ends of those shots in order to avoid a situation where, for example, the final frame of a given shot might be displayed in FCP as “OK” but in fact be composed of the final field of the ouitgoing shot and the first field of the incoming one.

I guess the other question would be: since the material is film-sourced and the 3:2 pulldown is intact, could I simply digitize and cut at 24fps (eliminating the pulldown) and then reinstate the 3:2 on output back to D-Beta with full online quality? Quality is the primary issue here as this is not an offline situation.

Thanks again in advance!

[Paul Provost]

I’m not sure I understand either, but if you are monitoring on an ntsc monitor (not your computer’s screen) you will see if you have an overlapping field from the last or previous shot (flickering back and forth between fields) right?

[Smoked Meat]

Yes, Paul, you’re correct. And that’s the way it should be for proper cadence.

My goal is to produce a new 29.97 master. Of the material I’m *not* deleting, I cannot afford to lose video frames in order to make the cut point look “good.” I must keep every frame within the shots I am keeping.

Again, perhaps there’s a simple answer to this. I’m very experienced with cutting features in the 24/23.98 fps realm. But onlining and this intra-frame stuff has eluded my experience somewhat.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Thanks for the extra details. I spoke with the engineers and they said that, due to the 3:2 pulldown process, you can’t just cut your video anywhere. If you do, you will encounter the very problem you are trying to avoid, ie a single frame showing fields from two other frames.

Due to the way the 3:2 pulldown process works, you can only make a clean cut every 5 seconds. That fields in that frame belong to itself and will not cause you any problems so I think that is the answer to your question.

We can do inverse telecine from 29.97 NTSC to 23.98 fps progressive video, and then we can re-insert pulldown when playing back. This is nice because you can work with progressive video in NTSC, and this makes streaming, and effects work much easier. It also allows film editing.

I know the some people say that you cannot do film editing at 23.98, and you need to have “true 24 fps” however this is untrue, and you can edit film fine with 23.98. All NTSC telecined material faces the same speed shift issue, and so you use the same workflows.

Cinema Tools supports 23.98, and everything works fine. However it’s up to the editor when it comes to film, and this feature is used more by effects artists, and people who want to edit in progressive video. We could also add 24.0 support, however we are not asked about it very much, so we have been focusing on other features such as down conversion from HD on all of our cards, and RT color correction on the DeckLink HD card.

That’s also another good option for film editing, and DeckLink HD can do both 24.0 and 23.98 fps, and we also have a JPEG offline mode which allows you to use full resolution HD but at lower quality, and quite low data rates. So this is a nice option for film offline, as you don’t need to convert between video and film frame rates, and you could have a complete 24 or 23.98 shoot, edit and finish workflow. Because DeckLink HD is low cost, it makes a nice affordable solution for this work.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Smoked Meat]

Thanks again Luke.

Just to be crystal clear: you’re saying I can capture my 29.97 fps interlaced D-Beta as 23.98 fps progressive video, then reinstate the 3:2 pulldown and lay it back to D-Beta as 29.97 interlaced. And the sharpness and quality of my final layback will be precisely the same as the original D-Beta source?