[Glenn Chan]

Can the deck actually remove the advanced pulldown for you? That way, it can spit out a 23.98fps signal and that won’t have any pulldown in it. So you could work with that. Just a guess here.

The AJ-HD1700 seems capable of that.
https://www.vtpcorp.com/htm/camcorderhdvtr.htm

Some claim, blackmagic figured out the way for proper 24p Mode Advance (2:3:3:2 pulldown).
I have no idea. I don’t believe it’s possible unless you can assume that the pulldown always starts/stops on a 0 or 5. But really, I wouldn’t know.

[Glenn Chan]

The following article might have useful information for you.
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/pana_24p__cinetools.html

As you capture, make sure you check what the pulldown sequence is on the tape. See the article above.

So you’re basically:
A- capturing using a normal 60i 525/29.97fps preset / easy setup.
B- Removing advanced pulldown via Cinema Tools, which makes a bunch of 24p quicktimes.
C- Bring those quicktimes into a 24p FCP project (well 23.98p to be exact).

Or…
2- Ask the client if they want to edit in 60i. The 24pA footage is very similar to 60i footage and can be edited as such. If you need to get work done, this may be the way to do it.

3- Getting a deck with firewire out may make the capture process less painful. The quality should be the same if you can avoid re-compressing to DVCPRO50. If you are mastering to DVCPRO50, firewire capture would actually be slightly better (since its copying the data around, and you don’t incur any generation loss). The quality difference in any case may be neglible.

4- AFAIK, FCP can’t capture and accurately remove the advanced pulldown. There is a method of capture where FCP can capture and remove advanced pulldown at the same time. This will generate 24p uncompressed files. The problem however is that the advanced pulldown flags are not transmitted over SDI. So FCP can’t correctly guess where the cadence starts. When it guesses incorrectly, it will discard the wrong frame(s) and the resulting 24p file will have motion artifacts.

[Glenn Chan]

1- I think you can easily get confused about setup because the terminology is imprecise / the context is not always clear.

When people say “DV has no setup”, they are referring to DIGITAL levels.
When people say “NTSC (except for Japan) has 7.5 IRE setup”, they are referring to ANALOG levels.

It’s less confusing if you specify whether you’re talking about:
A- Digital levels.
B- Analog levels.
C- Digital <--> analog conversion.

Problems typically occur due to C, although you can have problems with A or (more rare) B.

The following article I wrote hopefully clears things up:
https://glennchan.info/articles/technical/setup/75IREsetup.html

2- This is second-hand information, but the Canopus ADVC-1xx series should handle digital<-->analog conversions correctly and is switchable between 7.5 and 0 IRE setup.

[Glenn Chan]

1- If you finish on a 60i master, then you may be able to work with the footage as if it were 60i (just watch for timecode issues if you need to re-capture).

2- If you want a 24p master, then it’s easier if you capture via firewire. An advantage of a 24p master would be if you were making a DVD- 24p saves space (24fps progressive instead of 30fps interlaced; roughly 25% space saved, ignoring the interaction of interlaced/progressive with the encoder). If a 24p master is not a big deal, then you may just want to work in 60i. Sometimes this may be better, if the broadcaster wants the show packaged as a 60i master with very specific times (down to the frame).

Firewire carries the pulldown flags, which lets FCP know where the 2:3:3:2 cadence starts. Without these flags (i.e. when capturing over SDI and telling it to remove advanced pulldown), FCP will blindly guess the cadence and get it wrong (1 in 5 chance of guessing the cadence correctly). So instead of doing that, capture in 60i. You should be able to use Cinema Tools and manually guess the right cadence. Cinema Tools should take the 60i files and convert them to 24p files.

2b- Why not just capture firewire if you can?

3- If they are onlining 24pA footage elsewhere, you really need to pay attention. Some online systems (i.e. Mistika) can’t remove advanced pulldown. So either work with the footage as it were 60i footage, or make FCP remove the advanced pulldown *and* output something the online system will accept it.

[Glenn Chan]

In my opinion, DVDs are sketchy since they can be easily damaged. And some optical media (especially the cheap stuff) can degrade in 2 years.

2- If you will shoot on a data-based camera like HVX, Red, SI, etc. etc. then it might make a lot of sense to get a computer-based tape-based backup like LTO.

[Glenn Chan]

My *gmail* account is glennchan@___.com

[Glenn Chan]

Ben, I agree that this is a serious bug in FCP.

Until the bug gets fixed, one would have to figure out the best workaround unfortunately.

[Glenn Chan]

0.75R 0.00G 0.00B are 75% saturated.
Any way, Glenn, as I sayd before, I think we have a terminology problem.
This is the point. To me, 0.75R 0.00G 0.00B is 100% saturated. And I would be correct based on *my* definition of saturation (saturation = chromaticity). Chromaticity is not a “magnitude in video” but it is a useful concept especially in artistic work.

To you, 0.75R 0.00G 0.00B is 75% saturated. And you would be correct if you’re talking about the strength/magnitude/amplitude of the resulting signals.

2- In much of digital video, Y’CbCr encoding is used. The Y’ component (luma) contains the luma channel, while Cb and Cr are color difference components (chroma). So there is such thing as luma and chroma in digital video. The scale factors and the offsets however are different. Charles Poynton’s book has good information on this.
https://www.poynton.com/DVAI/index.html

3- If you’re interested, there are differences between the luma of video engineering and the luminance of color science. So you may want to avoid the term luminance, since it generally does not apply.
https://www.poynton.com/papers/YUV_and_luminance_harmful.html

The main difference is in the order of operations. Gamma correction is applied before forming luma. With luminance, gamma correction would be applied after forming luminance.

[Glenn Chan]

Does anyone know if “mark long frames” will be useful in detecting actual timecode breaks? It doesn’t seem to detect phantom TC breaks… so perhaps it is useful for determining which is the case.

Otherwise, my workaround would be:
Set FCP to warn about timecode breaks instead of make new clips.
Manually capture a test clip from the end of the tape. You can plop this into a test timeline and line up the timecodes. Set the top clip to composite mode “subtract” and scrub through the footage to see if everything matches up. Verify audio sync too.

[Glenn Chan]

What I’m saying is illustrated in the following example.

Suppose you have the following values:
1.00R’ 0.00G’ 0.00B’
0.75R’ 0.00G’ 0.00B’
0.50R’ 0.00G’ 0.00B’
0.25R’ 0.00G’ 0.00B’

I would say that all four values have the same chromaticity. They are all “red”.

However, they do not all share the same color difference components.

1.00R 0.00G 0.00B
Y’ (Rec. 601) = 0.299
B’ – Y’ = -0.299
R’ – Y’ = 0.701

0.75R 0.00G 0.00B
Y’ (Rec. 601) = 0.22425
B’ – Y’ = -0.22425
R’ – Y’ = 0.52575

0.50R 0.00G 0.00B
Y’ (Rec. 601) = 0.1495
B’ – Y’ = -0.1495
R’ – Y’ = 0.3505

0.25R 0.00G 0.00B
Y’ (Rec. 601) = 0.07475
B’ – Y’ = -0.07475
R’ – Y’ = 0.17525

*Rec. 601: Luma (Y