[Andrew Bernard]

Yes, Compressor seemed to be my best option: not allowing these authoring programs to overdo, or assume, anything! From the 24 fps QT I used Compressor to create a 23.976 Mpeg4 and fed it to Platinum straight across, and we finally got a great BluRay with accurate motion. Whew!

Thanks for letting me know that 24 fps Blu was a wild goose chase, it put me on the right track.

[Andrew Bernard]

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply. Yes, we used to shoot 35mm animation and the framerate was never an issue after telecine. But this is a whole other ball of wax, as the digital animation here necessitated a pure 24 fps workflow.

Yes, when I export from FCP7 using 23.976 as a “custom framerate”, it just seems to ignore the command. At least, Quicktime and these authoring programs identify the resulting QT file as 24 fps (though now it seems impossible to know for sure, with each program seeming to have a different idea of what they call 24 fps! Quicktime movie inspector says 24 fps though).

I’ll give Compressor another shot at giving me an actual 23.976 version and report back! I think I’ve tried this already – I’ve been trying all sorts of variations – but now I can’t remember why it didn’t work out..

[Andrew Bernard]

hi david,

ah! i did not know that about having to open a new timeline! so i would have needed to create a new sequence and import everything in from the existing one?

24 fps is our timebase because it is a purely 24 fps digital animation project with no telecine involved.

[Andrew Bernard]

Thanks again for your help!

[Andrew Bernard]

Gotcha…. we will be making a DCP, but for that I will be bringing the original PT session to a 5.1 mix stage, so FCP should no longer be a factor (and the professionals there would be able to tame any weird sync problem better than me anyway!) I mainly need the mix to behave properly here in FCP for exporting stereo Quicktimes.

[Andrew Bernard]

Well, I don’t know if the Easy Setup is still the primary suspect in this case. Since changing that to 24, brand new exports with new names from ProTools are all still playing back at the wrong speed when I bring them in to FCP.

I did the 99.9% slowdown trick in FCP and that makes the project sync perfectly from head pop to tail pop. It does seem like a bit of a hacky way to make the soundtrack sync though, and I’m not sure if it is an ideal long-term solution. Would moving forward with it like this create any compromise in sound quality?

I will meanwhile look into Waveagent, thanks… how strange that FCP has such difficulty with pure 24 fps projects.

[Andrew Bernard]

Hi Michael,

I’d read your posts about this issue elsewhere and have been trying to fix it this exact way 🙂

Unfortunately, changing the Easy Setup to NTSC 24 + deleting and renaming the audio files has not done the trick yet. The mixes are still importing to FCP at the incorrect duration (playing back too fast and ending 1 second too early). I have been deleting and renaming the mixes on a separate external drive, which is plugged into the same computer. Is that perhaps not thorough enough?

I’ve just tried exporting new mixes from ProTools, pulled down to 47952 to accomodate for FCP’s speed up. And bizarrely, FCP is still insisting on playing them back at the wrong speed, exactly like the 48000 files.

[Andrew Bernard]

Is there anything I can try?

I read that FCP may get its audio import information not from any of your sequence settings or the audio file, but from your original “Easy Setup” settings. My Easy Setup was in fact set at the wrong frame rate at first. But I have since changed it to NTSC 24 fps, and the audio is still importing 1 second too fast…

[Andrew Bernard]

Upon further investigation, FCP seems to be playing back all my audio imports too fast. From head pop to tail pop, my soundtrack AIFF file measures 16:28. But when imported into FCP, the file length is suddenly 16:27.

Even with other similar-length audio that FCP itself has exported, when imported back into FCP, it is now 1 second shorter.

Why is FCP doing this?