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NIGHTMARE – Please help: 16mm to MiniDV to HD problems
I am having a nightmare trying to figure out this problem. A lot of it is down to my own stupidity / naivete (being a first time editor) and a fair bit was bad guidance from the film telecine lab.
The story thus far.
-I shot on 16mm film. Obviously at 24 fps. Audio was recorded separately in 48khz files.
-I was (in my opinion) misadvised by the lab to telecine to MiniDV and edit on that rather than telecine straight to the final HD straight away. (Not that much footage, it’s a short.)
-I received MiniDV NTSC 29.97fps footage. I edited my film with these files in a 29.97 timeline. (I didn’t realise then that I probably should have reversed telecine and worked in 24fps).
-I found a post house to do transfer of original film slats to HD 1080p. They assisted me in creating a 24p EDL and all was ok.
-But a misunderstanding at the post-house meant that instead of transferring just my selects, they transferred almost all my original footage making my original MiniDV telecine a redundant step (but nonetheless this is a bonus for me if I want to go back into the edit as most of my footage is in HD now).
-I tried to Reconnect my footage using the EDL. But for some reason it wouldn’t work. So I painstakingly went through the MiniDV edit (using the imprinted timecode overlay) and matched the I/O points on the clips into a new Sequence.
-I should add that the HD footage was returned to me in files with a framerate of 23.98. So the sequence I created was 23.98.
-When I went to copy just the audio tracks from my MiniDV edit, and paste them into the new HD 23.98 sequence the Audio is out-of-sync roughly 5 frames every 20 seconds.
-I attempted a new sequence at 24fps and pasted everything into this. but still a sync problem.
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So, to summarise:
1. 16mm film to MiniDV 29.97 (30 ndf)
2. Edited in 29.97
3. Transferred to 1080p 23.98
4. Reimported
5. Dragged audio from miniDV project
6. Out of Sync Audio: 5 frames fast in roughly 20 seconds (1 every 4 seconds).———-
Please please please can someone help me out here. I am worried I have done something really stupid somewhere. This is my first film I have edited myself.
I have quite a technical brain normally, but for some reason with framerates and, incidentally, annual TAX returns, my brain coils up and tries to hide in the corner of my skull.
My final delivery format is 1080p video. Which sponsors an additional question; should I be piecing it together in a 24 fps or a 23.98fps sequence? again, my audio was recorded at 48khz.
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5 Replies
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Sounds like a right pain, try sticking everything on a 23.98 sequence, I’d deliver at 23.98 too unless told otherwise.
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[Rik Flynn] “My final delivery format is 1080p video. Which sponsors an additional question; should I be piecing it together in a 24 fps or a 23.98fps sequence? again, my audio was recorded at 48khz.”
Absolutely edit in 23.976fps. The video rate is already there. You’ve done all of the hard part where video is concerned by creating a new edit for edit sequence in 23.976. Now you have to pull down the audio.
You shot at 24fps and recorded at 48kHz.
You’re now at 23.976fps (-0.1%). Audio should come down by the same percentage, so 47952 Hz. How do you go about doing that? Well, it can’t be that sampling rate in your project, obviously. So the next best thing is to stretch the 48kHz audio to make it long enough so that it is effectively 47952Hz worth of audio passing in a second. That’s where Compressor comes in. There is a way to transcode your audio so that it is stretched by the correct percentage. Call up the preset for 48kHz AIFF and go to Frame Controls. Set it like this:
Process your audio files and they should be in sync with the video. Now you just have to relink or re-edit the new audio.
This is a way I have done it before and may not be the best or easiest way – somebody else here may have a better idea. Good luck.
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I have a question for you Mark,
Is there a difference between changing the sampling rate of the audio in compressor and setting it in FCP to speed 100.1%?
Thanks,
Nandan
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[Nandan Rao] “Is there a difference between changing the sampling rate of the audio in compressor and setting it in FCP to speed 100.1%?”
Good question. I don’t know if there is a difference, honestly. I have a sneaking feeling though that Compressor might do a better job of this, and another feeling that Pro Tools would do it even better. It may be such a minor difference though that it wouldn’t matter. I’ll have to test this out at some point.
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Thank you all so very much. I will try the Audio recompress later.
However, I noted that 100.1 percent speed adjustment wouldn’t have accounted for my 5 frames fast every 20 seconds (sorry, I keep saying that and it is more simple to say 1 frame every 4 seconds). So I decided to just drag the MiniDV footage onto my timeline to see where it was going off. Turns out, Final Cut does a rudimentary reverse telecine process on 29.97 footage when you dump it onto a 23.98 timeline. So I am now able to match precisely the cuts from the original edit. Turns out I had quite a high error rate when I did it by calculating the timecode equivalents between 29.97 and 23.98 (only ever attempt this method of matchback for a World Record in stupidity). So I should be alright now.
Just out of interest. If I get the cuts to match will I still need to compress the audio to 47~~~ Hz? Now that I know which format I want to work on (23.98) thanks to your kind suggestions, I think I will be able to do some more searches for answers already posted here.
Thanks again.
An invaluable resource for getting out of problem solving thought loops.
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