[John Papola]

Hmm… the advanced pulldown is a different issue than the duplicate frames created in 720P (I think). I had used the “DVC Pro HD Frame Rate Converter” which strips out the audio. Interlaced mode with advance cadence is a different animal. Thanks for the tip though.

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY

[John Papola]

I’m not in front of my FCP Machine, but two questions for you. So when you use the convertion tool, it retains the audio in the new file? Second is, does it allow you to batch-convert?

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY

[John Papola]

Unfortunately, this strips out the audio, so you’re better off keeping a drive with 5.1.4 around for capture.

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY

[John Papola]

Contact Apple support so they know it’s a widespread issue and fix it ASAP. As of right now, I’m having to boot off a backup drive with FCP 5.1.4 to do the import than boot back into 6 to work.

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY

[John Papola]

“Negative.
On capture the redundant fields are removed to give you 23.98 actual frames, which playback on a monitor as 48i- This is a function of the 1080 PsF specification and done on all 1080 24p content captured to tape in camera. That is why the format is called a progressive segmented frame. ”

So if Final Cut actually generates a different, smaller file that’s 23.98 native instead of an interlaced 29.97, doesn’t that mean it’s re-encoding the footage and causing a compression generation loss? Or… is the DVC Pro HD codec along with the segmented frame spec allow for the fielded frames to be recombined without a decoding and re-encoding the progressive image.

I’ll be very curious. An easy test would be to import one without removing the interlace and one with and check the file size.

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY

[John Papola]

I am very sad to report that a totally clean reinstall did NOT fix the problem on my Mac Pro. Sh*t, this blows. Talk about dropping the ball on a feature that really helps set Final Cut apart. I’ll be calling Apple support tomorrow as well as digging through my contacts to see if I can get a little closer to the source. Is Michael Wong still at Apple? I’ll be sure to email from my mtv networks address.

Grrrrr…….. looks like I’m gonna need to have my DIT bring his laptop to set for the import instead of mine.

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY

[John Papola]

1080i 24PA to my knowledge operates differently than the progressive flagged-frame varicam stuff. Instead of physically removing the duplicate frames, 1080i 24PA footage is retained in it’s interlaced form and played back at 23.98 through a realtime reverse 3:2 pulldown. The usual cadence of advance mode interlace is done to facilitate this realtime pulldown removal as standard 3:2 cadence is apparently much harder to extract. That said, you shouldn’t have to use any tools to extract the pulldown. I’ve shot a number of spots with 1080i 24PA and haven’t had to do anything to the clips on import. So looks like we possibly have two import bugs on our hands.

My Mac Pro is also exhibiting this inability to detect and remove the duplicate frames on import, so I’m going to remove final cut and re-install it. Hopefully this is something related to old files from FCP5. I hope.

Again, if anyone else is having this trouble, I’d love to hear about it… and hopefully a solution.

Thanks

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY

[John Papola]

My understanding of 1080i 24PA is that it works similar to the DVX100’s 24P advanced mode. That is, the material is retained on disk as interlaced but played back at 23.98 through a realtime pulldown removal at the quicktime level. I do have some material that I shot in 1080 24PA on the HDX and it does appear to be 23.98 in quicktime player. Still… I believe that the 1080i material is still there in it’s original interlaced form. Otherwise, the import would be doing a re-encode on the interlaced frames as it extracts them to progressive frames. The traditional varicam cadence is progressive, so final cut can simple drop the non-flagged frames without any re-encoding necessary.

I just tested this on my Mac Pro (8-core) and got the same result. 720p shot at 23.98 comes in at 59.94 with duplicate frames still there. I’m going to try uninstalling Final Cut and re-installing it. Perhaps that will help since this install was over top of the old version.

Sigh….

John Papola
Executive Producer / Director
Spike TV
New York, NY