Mixed Fields Footage

[Joseph Wilkins]

How would I do that? And then how would I interpret it? Set my timeline to NONE?

[Eli Mavros]

If your clips are not looking spectacular in the canvas, I would just do a test and export a quicktime movie and view it in QT, because I often find that it is not an accurate picture of what your final export will look like (when it comes to fields at least). If you have fast enough hard drives, I would probably use a 10bit Uncompressed timeline, though if you are not using FCP 6 you will have to render every time you make a change. The other option is what was mentioned before…export everything from compressor as a common format, ProRes would probably be great for this. I know that you can de-interlace things in Compressor, you can also add a de-interlace filter in FCP, though this might be good for your web version, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for the DVD version…plus, don’t de-interlace anything with type as it will be noticeably fuzzy. I would say the better bet would be to use something like After Effects and insert a pulldown into your 24p progressive HD footage (adding fields and making them 29.97) or conversely if your DV stuff is actually 24p footage that has pulldown, then you can remove the pulldown to make it 24p and match your HD stuff. I am being presumptuous by thinking that these are the two frame rate/field issues you speak of…though I guess it could be otherwise.

Best,
Eli

[Jeremy Garchow]

Joseph-

I have found that when using mixed format timelines I have had to schange all of the clips field dmonance to match the feild dmoniacne of the timeline. I have not checked this with FCP 6.0.2, but FCP 6.0.1 was definitely like this. It’s a P.I.A. I explain it more in this article.

Jeremy