[Alan Okey]

What is the format of your footage?

What are your sequence settings?

Is the 59.94 footage 24p shot over 59.94 (i.e. 24p shot over 720p60 with a 3:2 cadence) or true 59.94 (720p60)?

[Alan Okey]

[Andreas Kiel] “Was no polite reply to Alan – Please stop this.
“

No, it’s OK – I misunderstood Uli’s original question and then I was a bit snippy in my reply. No harm intended and no offense taken.

Uli, I hope you’re able to find a satisfactory solution. It’s sometimes difficult to process questions on this forum because of the mix of beginner and advanced questions. Clearly you’re in the advanced category, and as such it can sometimes take a little longer to get a reply form someone with the necessary level of experience in the specific area of the question. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be of much help.

I would also like to know how others are dealing with many tracks of unsynced audio on features.

[Alan Okey]

Choose the field dominance setting that matches your source footage. For NTSC (or PAL DV/DVCPRO), use lower field first. For PAL (non DV), use upper field first. For progressive footage (24P, 30p) use none.

Whether or not the project is played back on DVD has no relevance to the choice of field dominance in sequence settings.

[Alan Okey]

[Uli Kunkel] “Thanks for your input, but you didn’t answer my question. “

Thanks for adding the relevant details of your project that should have been in your orignal post.

[Alan Okey]

[Uli Kunkel] “At times there were as many as 8 mics playing at once in a scene, and all of those audio tracks playing simultaneously in my timeline got a little cumbersome not to mention bogged down performance. “

I find it hard to believe that 8 audio tracks bogged down your system, unless you have a really old system. Try turning off audio waveforms in your timeline if you’re having lag issues.

[Alan Okey]

[John Sniadecki] “Yes, unfortunately we shot different frame rates (29.97 and 23.98).”

In your original post, you stated you shot SD in 24p. You say in a later post that your SD is 29.97. Which is it?

Obviously if you shot to tape, it’s going to be a 29.97 signal, but if you shot in 24p or 24pA mode, there will be 3:2 pulldown present in the clips. You can remove the pulldown and create native 24p clips by using Cinema Tools. If you did indeed shoot 24p, did you shoot 24p Advanced, or 24p standard? If you shot 24p Advanced, you can remove the advanced pulldown automatically in Cinema Tools even after you’ve captured the clips. Even if you didn’t shoot 24pA, you can still use Cinema Tools to reverse telecine your SD clips, you just need to manually guide the process by specifying the A frame.

Assuming you shot in a 24p mode in SD, I would recommend cutting in a native 24p SD sequence instead of cutting in a 29.97 SD sequence. Conform your SD clips to 24p using Cinema Tools, then downconvert your 24p HD clips to 24p SD. This will avoid the need to add 3:2 pulldown to your HD clips upon downconversion.

By following this workflow you will also end up with the nice side benefit of being able to author a true 24p DVD.

[Alan Okey]

[Fred Miller] “Put your edit on an SD (29.97) sequence and let Final Cut add the pull-down to your 23.98 clips (along with scaling down to SD. “

Absolutely, positively DO NOT DO THIS. FCP can’t properly add 3:2 pulldown to 24p clips on a 29.97 timeline, and FCP’s scaling algorithm was invented by Satan himself.

Batch downconvert all of your HD clips using Compressor before importing them into your SD project in FCP. Follow these steps:

-Change the frame rate to 29.97 in the compression section of the video encoding profile

-Make sure to enable frame controls in the Compressor inspector panel

-Set resizing quality to best

-Set field order to lower field first

-Set output size to 720×480

If you set up your profile correctly, Compressor will add 3:2 pulldown to your 24p source clips.

[Alan Okey]

[Chris Babbitt] “So, I’m assuming that the only reason for producing a progressive DVD is if you want the 24p look?
Would you still recommend shooting 60p over 60i if going to an interlaced DVD? “

Two benefits of progressive footage:

1. If 24p, there’s a space savings on a DVD of 20% vs. 29.97i or 30p. Also, at a given average bit rate, bit allocation will be proportionally higher per frame given the fewer number of frames per second.

2. Progressive frames generally encode with better results than interlaced frames in MPEG-2 compression.

However, if you don’t want a progressive look (24p or 30p), stick with 720p60.

Consumer LCD and plasma TVs have built-in hardware deinterlacing, which essentially turns 29.97i into 60p. If you shoot 720p60 and downconvert to a 29.97i DVD, the result on a consumer LCD or plasma TV will retain the “live” look of 60p.

Assuming you’re not using a Teranex hardware converter for downconversion, 720p60 will give better results than 1080i29.97 when downscaling to SD 29.97i because no field scaling/interpolation will be necessary.

[Alan Okey]

[Bryan Roberts] “I have this deep suspicion that this is how Apple gets older systems like my 2006 intel mac pro, to upgrade to newer systems by making their newest operating systems get slower and slower as they become more processor intensive. “

Actually, the reverse is true. Ars Technica’s John Siracusa famously wrote:

For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release—and not just “faster in the experience of most end users”, but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.

[Alan Okey]

What are:

– your sequence settings for the original sequence you sent to Color?

– your project settings in Color (i.e. rendering to the original format, or to a new format)?

– your sequence settings in the sequence returned from Color?

Make sure all of your workflow is progressive, i.e. your sequence settings all have “none” selected for field dominance.