[Graeme Nattress]

I don’t know about capture flags for DVCpro50 over SDI. Unless there’s some very particular reason, I don’t see why FW won’t suffice for DVCpro50 though.

For best slowmo, there’s a couple of options really – shoot at as high a frame rate as you can, or use fancy expensive slow rendering plugins like Twixtor to magic in the extra frames.

What I’m advising is shooting at as high a frame rate as possible, and then, for more slowmo, using the best quality option, which would be to play fields back as if they were frames, giving an instant, high quality 50%. Add in that you’re going from 60i to 24p, that gives an extra few percent, getting a lovely 40% for you.

Now, if the rest of the edit is going to be 24p, then that leaves a big problem, as you’d have to convert the 60i to 24p. That can be done, and indeed I have my plugins which will do it for you nicely, but it’s always better to shoot real 24p for 24p if you can.

I see that you have two choices –

1) shoot 24pA, edit 23.98fps, have great looking 24p, accept that slowdown will look not too hot, or extensive twixtor render times.

2) shoot 60i, get great 40% and 80% slowdowns with little render time, but have to convert the 60i to 24p for the normal speed stuff, which can never look quite as good as real 24p.

Obbiously, a hybrid between the two would be best, shooting 60i when you know that it needs to go slow, and 24p for normal speed stuff, but it doesn’t sound like that’s possible. The good thing is, there’s solutions whichever way you want to go, but I don’t think either is perfect.

Hope that helps,

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

If you shoot 24p to edit in a 29.97fps timeline, the 24p will have 3:2 pulldown in it, which unless removed first, will look really dodgy in a slowdown. What I’d be tempted to do is shoot in 24pA and edit in a 23.98fps timeline so that you don’t have any pulldown. This will therefore lead to two good slowmo speeds as follows:

shoot 30p and conform to 23.98fps in Cinema Tools for a subtle 80% slomo, perfect quality
shoot 60i and conform to 23.98fps, then slow to 50% for a nice looking 40% slowmo

I’d not shoot at 1/500th shutter unless you want that Gladiator battle high shutter speed look. I’d shoot with the standard, 1/48th I think for 24p, and either 1/60th or 1/120th for the slowmo stuff, based upon experimentation.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

I don’t know about other people, but I’m looking forwards to the challenges, finding the solutions and making interesting programmes.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

But talent is where you find it, and has very little to do with “education”, especially in a traditional sense. I think we’ve all seen “professionals” who’ve been in the biz for years, had all the right education, been to all the right colleges, produce utter rubbish, and people without such traditional backgrounds produce brilliance. Cheap, affordable, high quality cameras level the playing field and force everyone to compete on talent, not dollars.

Just as with the glut of so-called “designers” that we got when the DTP industry took off, we’ve got that too in the television business, but DTP is now, for the very most part back in the hands of the true designers, except they can now run their business more profitably due to the quality of the now lower priced DTP tools.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

Sorry about that! It can be infuriating, I know!!

Certainly Film Effects will have some stuff that will help even Varicam footage, renders faster than MB for E too.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

I converted a small, 8 second clip via my conversion from NTSC to PAL and via compressor 2. In C2, that small clip took 35 minutes to render, for just a plain DV NTSC to PAL conversion. The quality was great, but still introduced the motion blur that a full optical flow simulation should not, so I don’t know exactly what they’re doing in there, other than it’s as slow as hell. My conversion took just 1 minute, and that’s on a Dual 2ghz G5, so you can see that C2 is very slow indeed.

Then I dropped the quality settings, and started getting unnacceptable conversions from C2. I’d get alternatiing frames of blurry and sharp when I lowered the de-interlace quality, and I’d get strobey motion on lowering the temporal quality.

Overall, I’d say to Apple, 10 points for quality, but -100 for speed.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

For PAL, take the movie to Cinema Tools and “conform” from 23.98fps to 25fps, and then downconvert and out to PAL. For NTSC you need to add 3:2 pulldown and downconvert. I think some of the hardware cards will do this, but if that’s not suitable for you, my Standards Conversion will add proper 3:2 pulldown, and the new version out soon will add improved downconverting (free upgrade).

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

The Decklink cards are great. No problems here.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

PAL DV is tricky…. I’ve got new filters that will deal with it, but I’m finding them ever-so-strong, and can do harm as well as good, depending on the settings. I should be putting them into the new Film Effects soon.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP

[Graeme Nattress]

My Standards Conversion plugin does great 60i to 24p conversions. I’d try that and see how you get on. Get the free demo at http://www.nattress.com

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP