True 24p PAL – IS IT POSSIBLE W/FCP 5.0???

[Francois Stark]

First if all: strictly speaking there is no such thing as 24P PAL.

PAL is by definition 50i, or if your source (such as animation) is progressively scanned, 25p.

I am trying to understand where you come from. How do you generate your 24p source? File sequences from animation? In which case, why not just use Quictime Pro to save the sequences as 25p, and import and sync your sound in FCP? From that point, the project lives in 25p.

Alternatively, you could be working on a old project containing lots of 24p clips from igniter.

In which case you’re stuck…

regards
Francois

[Sam Goetz]

When I say 24p PAL I mean it not as a format, but as a project set-up. I’m definitely aware that PAL is only 50i. What I want is a way to go from 24p to 50i with a speed up on playback like the igniter used to do and the Avid still does.

To ellaborate a little bit more, the reason why I need this speed up on playback instead of converting all my material before hand is that my animation will be coming in at 24fps timed to audio that is impossible to speed up.

Here’s the workflow:

1.) We get script.
2.) We create animatic with recorded dialogue on a 24fps sequence.
3.) We translate animatic into a 24fps timing sheet. It HAS to be 24fps because our animators will not animate at 25fps. It doesn’t work that way.
4.) We get the animation back at 24fps and it lines up perfectly with our animatic and our audio which is all at 24fps.

If we were to speed up our footage it would not line up with our audio. We cannot speed up our audio to match because it is an OMF and comprised of many different little parts. So, we need our footage to come into a 24fps timeline so it continues to match our initial timing sheets. On playback both video and audio are locked and sped up together and it works.

Make sense?

Thanks for the responses. Any more would be much appreciated.

[Misha Aranyshev]

If you make really big noise Apple will add “24@25 Speedup” setting in Playback Control eventually. Like in FCP 8. It took several years of pestering them with feedback, feature requests, petitions and visits to get through the idea that there are films made outside the States so they added “24@25 Pulldown”. I’m not sure what really did the work. Probably someone at Apple was going through the Shake registration log and was really impressed half of the entries listed New Zealand as a country of residence.

[Gary Adcock]

[sammyg] “If we were to speed up our footage it would not line up with our audio. We cannot speed up our audio to match because it is an OMF and comprised of many different little parts.”

Audio does not have a frame rate only the video does.
Audio is recorded in minutes and seconds
conform the video files to be 25p THEN add the audio.
it should still match up bases on the length of time.

10 minutes of audio at on a 24fps timeline is no different than
10 minutes of audio in a 25fps timeline.

I am with Francois -I do not understand your logic on this project.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows
Chicago, IL

[Uli Plank]

I’d also suggest you go with sped up video and original audio, but if you really want, you can probably fool FCP into using 24p in the timeline with an XML script like we did here in Germany for 25p and 50p in progressive DVCPro HD.

Have a look here (sorry, English translation not ready yet):

https://www.aulich-adamski.de/perm/720p50-capturing-editing-in-final-cut-pro

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Sam Goetz]

When you conform 24p PAL to 25fps 50i PAL the video is literally SPED UP 4.2% to keep a one-one ratio of one film frame to one video frame. If you decide to double frames or fields to get a 25fps movie that runs at the same duration as a 24fps movie you are going to get stuttery movement that is unacceptable.

I know that audio runs by sample rate and has nothing to do with FPS. What I meant by 24fps audio was audio that was TIMED to the 24fps animatic.

Bottom line: conforming our animation from 24fps to 25fps before we bring it into FCP will speed up our video and destroy our timing and nothing will sync. The only way to maintain timing is to have a 24fps sequence so our animation plays exactly as it was originally TIMED to our audio.

There is no other way to get a 25fps PAL clip that has acceptable movement than to speed it up, that’s why the best way to do this is on playback from a 24fps sequence.

[Felix Bueno]

I agree with you, sammyg. Your only purpose is just to avoid the weird 24@25repeat playback issue. In FCP 4.5 this issue worked much better than FCP 5.1. I mean that in this new version the video jumps and shakes much more then when we used the old version (repeat just 1 frame every second).

I do the same work than you, here in Spain, and the jumps are really annoying, it’s hard to concentrate on the animation. Sometimes artists ask this jumps as a mistake and I always has to explain the same.

Let’s do lots of noise, maybe we’ll get the 24@25speedup setup that someone mentioned above…

Felix Bueno

http://www.filmaxanimation.com
http://www.homepage.mac.com/felixbueno

[Sam Goetz]

Dave,

The problem isn’t finishing in 50i. That’s easy. The problem is playing back at the correct speed while we edit and evaluate footage. Exporting our video out of FCP and re-conforming the audio and video every time we need to evaluate motion is not a solution.

PLEASE, FCP, PLEASE LET’S GET 24 @ 25 SPEED UP ON PLAYBACK! WE’RE DYING FOR IT!

[Sam Goetz]

The Avid DOES do a true 24p to 50i speed up on playback. You can hear the pitch shift and evaluating frame by frame proves it for sure.

The 24@25 options in FCP as they now stand are unacceptable for our evaluative purposes. It’s not just a matter of not liking it. We need to see the footage as it will look in its final form so that we can send notes back on animation and tweak motion as we go. It’s not just a matter of being picky. 24@25 REPEAT and PULLDOWN look pretty darn awful on movement, and will not allow us to give proper notes to our animators.

Looks like until FCP makes this a function, it’s Avid or HD OFFLINE for us … sigh …

[Sam Goetz]

This WOULD allow us to work in 25 w/ sunk audio and video, and I’ve proposed this work around to my producers before, but the problem they have with it is that the footage we will be looking at on our timeline will not match the footage the animators are delivering.

What might be frame 37 on our end could be frame 35 for them. A lot of the editing for us involves calling back bad animation and without a common timecode base between us, it would be impossible to establish a ground on which we could point out frame accurate mistakes. To add to this, the animation is overseas, so bringing them in and showing them mistakes is out of the question.

We could ask our animators for a burn in on all of their animation, but that would have to go away for the final animation, which also goes through a rigorous call back process. Also, unfortunately, FCP’s 24@25 timecode function only works one way (giving 25fps timecode for 24fps material not 24fps timecode for 25fps material).

Basically, any conform of the animation is out of the question. I need 24p animation playing back at 25 w/ a 4.2% speed up. HAS ANYONE INVENTED SOMETHING TO MAKE THIS WORK?