Graeme Nattress
Forum Replies Created
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Try G Speed in my free plugins, http://www.nattress.com
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Well, I attended a great HD seminar at the SMPTE in Toronto, where they showed direct comparisons between HDCAM and Film, shot in the same place at the same time, and we all saw what I described above – HD had a much more stable picture, with more shadow detail and highlights didn’t over-expose as gracefully. I find it hard to believe that film has more shadow detail when crushing your blacks on the video will give it a much more filmic look, and given the s-shaped characteristic gamma curve of film, you can see how the highlights are naturally protected and that blacks are recorded darker than they should be, compared to the relatively linear mid range.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Thanks. That’s a very technical way of looking at it. Artistically, the biggest difference is usually budget 🙂 And good lighting.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Did you de-interlace in FCP?
Open Cinema Tools, hit cancel.
Open File, select movie, hit conform, select 23.98fps.
Make a 23.98fps NTSC DV timeline in FCP, use an easy preset to do this.
Drop your movie from CT into it, scale it to fit, and now you have a 23.98, ie 24p movie you can make a NTSC DVD with.
G
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Ah, but what is film resolution? In practical terms, ie, a print being watched in a typical cinema, film has no more real resolution than HD, and HD will look better as it will be more stable. That’s why 2k is used for scanning, as it’s more than adequate compared to the resolution of the viewing print.
As for lattitude – Film certainly handles highlights more gracefully, but I’d say it’s a lot worse in the shadows. If you shoot video without clipping highlights, it can take almost the dynamic range of film, and even look better too. If you can’t control the highlights, film will look better, but you’re probably loosing shadow detail.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Edit the clips to a DV timeline. Make sure field order is right and everything. Drag clips from timeline to the batch exporter, hit export with the DV settings of the timeline. I think that might work.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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But the quality from letting FCP convert is poor indeed. If you’ve got FCP5, you’ve got cinema tools and compressor 2. C2 will do a very nice standards conversion, and it’s so slow, it takes about 4h30m to convert 1 minute of footage, which is why people like my plugin for FCP which is about 40 times faster…….
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Blacks should be at 0% in the FCP waveform monitor. Are you seeing black below this? If so, can you arrange to send me a very small clip, and I’ll write a filter that will do what you want, but I need the footage to test it on.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Quick and easy? Two ways:
take the PAL movie, drop it into an NTSC project, make sure that FCP scales the video to fit, and export as NTSC. Quality will be stuttery, but it does work. If you go to Ken Stone’s I think he has a tutorial on it.
Much better is to export your PAL movie, de-interlace it to get 25p, stick it into cinema tools, conform to 23.98fps, take that video to an NTSC 23.98fps project, make sure it scales to fit, export as 23.98fps NTSC, and make a 24p DVD. Everything will run 4% slow, but the quality will be much better.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Just the normal 29.97fps DV NTSC is all you need.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP