[John Byrne]

Chris,

Thanks very much for clearing up the pulldown issue. We are wrestling with the format right now and indeed it has been suggested that we go to Final Cut Pro because it is far more intuitive with the VFR feature. However we are set up for Avid so uncertainty reigns!

One thing I didn’t follow was your note of wasting disk space. All our footage is shot 23.98 so I thought that when ingesting at this rate, in either SD 60i downconverted or 60p in a HD project the inserted/duplicated frames would be discarded anyway.

As for edit systems – the economical choice for Avid facilities appears to me to be Xpress Pro which uses the DVCPRO 100 codec. Is there any significant advantage to be using a HD codec/environment and offlining in progressive scan as opposed to downcoverted signals in an SD project? Is it a trap to move to interlace when the footage is shot progressively?

These questions all may sound stupid, the thing is we are in PAL land and all this is very new to us.

regards,
JB

[John Byrne]

In the film settings under Project there is an option to pulldown in standard 2:3:2:3 or Advanced 2:3:3:2. My thinking was that the Varicam will only do its insert in one way or the other when creating the additional frames when recording at 23.98/24 in order to lay down the complete 59.94/60 frames that it does every second. So correct me if I’m wrong but I must only used a standared pull down of 2:3:2:3 if the additional frames are inserted in this fashion in the first place. Using advanced would then remove the incorrect frames?