[Christopher Travis]

ok, I just tried this and now I’m getting lots of warping around moving elements. If it’s not too much trouble, could you post ALL of your settings for one of your successful conversions?

[Christopher Travis]

Hi John,

I just tried this and it did retain the exact duration, however when going through it frame-by-frame I see that it is repeating frames to do this.

I exported the 15s clip from my 23.98 Timeline
Conformed to 25fps in Cinema Tools
Took it into Compressor and in “Frame Controls” set “Set Duration” to 00:00:15:00 and exported from Compressor

Did I miss a step? Would it make a difference if I changed the “Rate Conversion” setting to something like “Best”?

thanks,
Chris

[Christopher Travis]

Hmmm,

This could be something to look into. I know that more and more of this commercial/cinema stuff is coming through this place so a solution like this might be worthwhile.

Thinking about it now though, I should probably check with the guys at the online facility to see if they have something like this they could do on playout at their end.

Thanks, I’ll look into this.

[Christopher Travis]

It’s Alexa footage. Its footage from a commercial shoot that arrived on LTO tapes from the other side of the Atlantic. We need to make 16 sponsorship idents (some 5s, some 10s and some 15s) from footage not used in the commercials. The footage had been pulled off the tapes when I sat down yesterday, all 8 TB of it. Since the amount of footage is so huge, but the actual amount of deliverable content is so small, I didn’t see the point in duplicating and/or transcoding to a lighter codec or new frame rate. Besides there is no space for it.

My plan is to cut at 23.98 in a 23.98 timeline to the exact duration required.

Then after final sign off, duplicate all the clips used in the final timelines. Conform those to 25FPS and rebuild the edits on a new 25FPS timeline. Doing it this way I:

*Only dupe the footage I need
*Only speed up the picture, leaving my seperate atmos, music and VO untouched and un-pitch adjusted.
*Get more control over my final duration.

This is tedious but the edits are very simple, with only a handful of shots in each clip so it’s manageable.

I was wondering if there might be a simpler way that would give as clean a result but it seems that my only other options are:

*Conform all footage first – Not an option, there is too much
*Conform final clip – Not so great since we have exact durations to meet.

[Christopher Travis]

I don’t want to conform it all before editing because there’s so much of it (20-30hrs of Prores 444) we simply don’t have the space to duplicate it. We’re producing no more than 3-4 minutes of edited content, it seems insane to duplicate all that media for that.

[Christopher Travis]

Yeah this is what I thought. These are really simple edits, just a handful of shots in each one. What do you think of my idea of conforming only the shots we’ve used after the final sign off and then rebuilding the edits?

It’s a bit tedious but as far as I can tell this gives us nice smooth conversion, with no stutters and control over where we adjust for changes in timing. This also means we’re only speeding up our picture, we can keep our music, SFX and VO at their original speed.

[Christopher Travis]

Cut at 30fps? Do you mean convert the 23.98 to 30 before cutting? and then won’t the duration change once i convert that to 25?

[Christopher Travis]

I suppose we’ll have to suck it and see.

Thanks

[Christopher Travis]

You’re right.

These things take time and frankly, I don’t know what I’d do if we suddenly went ALL PP ALL THE TIME overnight. I’m an FCP boy and I need a while to adjust anyway. I think the best course of action is to install CS6 on a couple of seats and for me to lead the way in editing as much as possible in PP and be patient while we wait for the rest of the industry to catch up. Assuming that this is in fact the direction the industry is heading. We could end up high and dry in 12 months time with a shop full of PP suites and no freelancers to use them.

[Christopher Travis]

On a side note, we are thinking of going over to PP at our place and we called a few agencies to see how many PP freelancers they had. The response was not encouraging. Out of 3 agencies, 2 of them said they had about 10-20 freelancers who knew PP, and the third had never even heard of it (!?)

It hasn’t totally discouraged my head of production (she remembers when it was hard to find FCP editors) but it has made everyone else a bit nervous about switching. It becomes harder for me to sell the switch when as far as our big 3 agencies are concerned there are only about 20-30 competent professionals in the city.