[Aaron Shirley]

I’m also trying to help Lonnie Martin on this issue, and I wanted to post the new developments. Using Avid MC 4.0.5, Lonnie brought the 1080-30i sequence with 1080-24p-60i-pulldown footage, into a 23.976p timeline and did the conversion. Most shots and scenes were moved around on the time line by a few frames (ranging on average from 1 to 8), leaving gaps here and there, but Lonnie went in and fixed the edit gaps and sent the result to the audio mixer to resync all of the sound clips.

Then, we discovered that Avid did not properly remove the pulldown cadence. Now in every shot we’ve checked, every 4th frame looks like it has twice the motion blur that all of the others have, as if two sequential frames were cross dissolved to get every 4th frame. It looks a lot better than it did with the pulldown, but we have strong doubts as to whether Netflix will accept it that way.

One possible solution is that Avid fixed that problem in MC5, which Lonnie could upgrade to and start the above process over. Does anyone know if this would help? Another possible solution is to send the pulldown version of the film to a post house and let them run it through a Snell&Wilcox Ukon which is supposed to remove “about 99% of pulldown” in real time, but that will cost almost 3 times as much as the Avid MC5 upgrade, which we have no reason so far to believe will work at all.