[Brian Newell]

Hey Peace Frog et al

We were intrigued with your post, as we have had the same problem here, although under simpler conditions, at our post house here. When we have HVX recorded p2 footage combined with Varicam footage on the timeline, and make a self-contained Quicktime, it exports to 1280X720 and then has to render when we drop the quicktime back in a new timeline. If we export just varicam or just p2 footage alone, it exports fine out to 960X720 and the quicktime does not have to render in the timeline.

Using the QT Conversion and specifiying the specific frame size works, but QT Conversion takes much longer to export than a regular “export to QT”, and this is a situation where time is of the essence at the end of the day, so we are trying to still use the regular, fast QT export but without having to render the whole QT in FCP after the fact.

Running on PPC G5s with Final Cut 5.1.4 (and no, we cannot upgrade to FCP 6 right now. Hopefully this will solve the issue when we upgrade eventually, but not for now)
Shooting 720p23.98 DVCPROHD on Varicam and HVX

[Brian Newell]

Cool.

Thanks so much for the quick responses!

[Brian Newell]

Sorry, one more thing.

I just need to know if there is any possibility of getting two separate channels of audio along with TC to the marantz. We’re pretty sure it’s not, but wanted to make sure, because we are trying to use the marantz for not only transcripts, but also as a back-up audio source. Right now we back up our audio to minidisc in the field, but because we want to send out transcripts, we were trying to add the marantz recorder and replace the minidisc, so that there would not need to be an additional item in the field, but if the marantz can only get a mix on one channel, then we would have to keep the minidisc as our backup. thanks.

[Brian Newell]

Thanks for the input!

[Brian Newell]

well, ideally you would recapture it at 30. You’ll be able to watch and edit the footage, but for delivery (btw, what is the ultimate delivery for this project?) you will have to downcovert to 29.97, likely, using a 3rd party converter, like an AJA Kona card.

[Brian Newell]

The varicam is techinally always recording at 60, but you should use the setting for whatever frame rate you shot it at- in your case 30fps

[Brian Newell]

Thanks all for all the input. Some of the clips successfully converted when using a new project, and a couple of them actually were 24 footage with the aperture closed way down and was tricking my eyeballing of it as 60. At least, that’s my best guess after succesfully capturing it as 23.98. Would have been nice if they had slated when switching frame rates on the fly, but at least it got solved.

As far as the unresolved question about at 24 clip on the head of a converted 60 clip, I didn’t see any correlation between the clips that were screwing up and the clips that had some regular speed on the head. In fact, some of them that converted succesfully to start had 24 on the head and it didnt affect it. But I’ll probably capture around the clips in the future anyway to eliminate any overlap.

[Brian Newell]

Walter-

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Yeah I had read that a couple places and tried just one or two clips that way, which didnt work. So now per your advice I am taking all the clips together and closing all other projects and just focusing on the conversions at hand. The first one so far has not worked succesfully, so I’ll keep you updated. A couple things that I was wondering whether they might affect it:

1) So any FCP settings in the new project matter?

2) Most of our footage is 23.98, and we capture everything with overlapping handles. So if a clip is overlapping a 23.98 clip on the head, does this affect the conversion, even if the clip successfully captured at 59.94?

3) Does the folder you are saving to matter, as far as keeping the converted media files together with their orignal offspeed clips?

Thanks