Slow Motion with final cut – stagnant frames?? On deadline :-((

[Bret Williams]

Yes. You are wasting enormous amounts of time and drive space by using animation codec if you shot in DV.

Animation codec only exists on the computer. Are you going to put this project back onto a DV tape at some point? If so, you’ll have to convert that animation codec to DV to do so. And run it through yet a third compression process and wasting more time and drive space. In fact, you’re actually making the image worse, although imperceptibly.

Animation codec is a good way to put things like a 3D animation on a CDRom with an alpha channel to then be composited in FCP. It’s not really used for video. If you need to do uncompressed video get a uncompressed card and the drives to match, then load the footage in via that card instead of DV.

You’re doing a martial arts video shot on DV. Use the DV preset and have fun. You’re making it all too complex because of some misinformation.

[Eightfish]

Hi Brett,
Thanks. That’s what I suspected. Here’s my dilemma – I had someone doing post production on my files. They took my footage off of PAL DV mini DVs and saved the files as 24FPS Animation files. They did their touch up (masking) in Animation 24fps mode… meanwhile, I believe PAL DV is shot in 25fps (in movie mode) – which has squeezed all the 25 frames now into 24 frames – distoring the speed in the animation file.

When I go to elongate this at 30% slow motion speed, the file gets all funky – frames are not consistent or smooth.

Obviously this person didn’t know what she was doing. Is there anyway you know of to get footage which was originally recorded at 25fps PAL DV, converted to Animation 24FPS, back to it’s original 25FPS PAL DV? I’ve tried a million combinations in compressor with no luck, but I’m not an expert at this. The show opens tomorrow in Minneapolis 🙁 20 hours and counting…

[Eightfish]

Hi Brett,
Thanks. That’s what I suspected. Here’s my dilemma – I had someone doing post production on my files. They took my footage off of PAL DV mini DVs and saved the files as 24FPS Animation files. They did their touch up (masking) in Animation 24fps mode… meanwhile, I believe PAL DV is shot in 25fps (in movie mode) – which has squeezed all the 25 frames now into 24 frames – distoring the speed in the animation file.

When I go to elongate this at 30% slow motion speed, the file gets all funky – frames are not consistent or smooth.

Obviously this person didn’t know what she was doing. Is there anyway you know of to get footage which was originally recorded at 25fps PAL DV, converted to Animation 24FPS, back to it’s original 25FPS PAL DV? I’ve tried a million combinations in compressor with no luck, but I’m not an expert at this. The show opens tomorrow in Minneapolis 🙁 20 hours and counting…