[Joseph Owens]

Given that some “Deliverables” guidelines specifically state that material shot in 23.98 SHALL BE EDITED on a 23.98 timeline, I have to wonder why people do this to themselves and A) violate the agreement with their broadcaster, and B) screw things up with the potentially disastrous results of contending with the consequences of mixing frame rates/ pulldown.
All for the dubious objective of reducing storage requirements by going to what is , when you think about it, just another codec — ie, DigiBeta. Re-compress to DVCHD, or whatever, and keep it the same aspect ratio and frame rate. Edit it in its native frame rate! Re-connect to the original media. You are going to be choosing edit points (in 29.97) that don’t exist in 24-frame land. That is why there is 3:2 pull down. The math doesn’t work between 24 and 30 — try to make twelve 2-frame cuts with 24 frame material on a 30 frame timeline sometime if you don’t know what I mean. You would actually need to edit the material on a 59.94 (field-based) timeline to keep it at least coherent, but it still won’t be even. Or, here’s something simple — To make 4 evenly spaced edits on a 24 frame timeline is easy — cut every 6 frames. Can you do this on a 29.97 timeline? No. You can only cut every 7 or 8 frames to achieve a similar result, but you can’t get exactly the same frame boundary. Same works(or rather, DOESN’T work) in reverse — How to do five cuts / sec on a 24 frame timeline — irrational math.

There, I feel better now…

JPO

[Joseph Owens]

WHY,WHY, WHY, do they always wind up with a light-sabre duel? WHY?

uh, sorry, spoiler…

oh, and why doesn’t the C-64 sound like Yoda… or at least talk in a funnier syntax?

JPO

[Joseph Owens]

Walter, I’ve been following the history here with Apple and its issues — WTF is going on with what appears to be a mad scramble behind-the-scenes, especially with their relatively recent acquisition of a certain colour-correction application — is there NOTHING that isn’t now broken? (Well, except for iTunes…)

There is going to have to be a massive whip-cracking shakeout (heh, heh, I said “Shake”), to get things back to where I thought this was all going — ie., a challenge to AVID, a path to affordable DI, …?

But until at least mid-April, everyone is just holding their breath, whistling past the graveyard (difficult to do). Pick your clich

[Joseph Owens]

And if you want an even more difficult, time-consuming way to do slow-motion, try Shake’s “interpolation” mode. It generates new “original” frames using a mesh algorithm. It does also have a “blend” and “nearest” mode — but you can get that in FCP.

JPO

[Joseph Owens]

All very interesting. So I am getting down to the short srokes here conforming an HDV project (having captured it FireWire native froman HVR-M25U), re-connecting it to an offline FCP edit — and I wouldn’t say it was a simple cuts-only project — far from it — motion changes, stacked opacity dissolves, text supers… and you’re saying I should not be able to do this?

What made the workflow really function, though, was MediaManaging the project (after picture lock) to eliminate unused reels/footage, then uncompressing. Then I was free to pick individual frames for still export (you can’t do this for sure with native HDV — because unless it is an “i” frame it DOES NOT EXIST), do some pretty nice “Shake” interpolated super-slow-mo’s, FinalTouch colour correction, and its ready for release.

The overall data rate of HDV is attractive, and doesn’t require a fast RAID — what it DOES require is a honking fast processor to synthesize all those predictive frames, so that it looks like you were shooting 60i rather than 2p. Yes, that is what you are shooting. The rest are made up out of difference frames — and the format is particularly vulnerable to falling completely apart if anything fast happens in your frame — a flashbulb, a flag waving, somebody waves a hand in front of the lens — just watch what happens there!

No such thing as free lunch.

JPO

[Joseph Owens]

You will have to do a frame conversion. 25->30, aspect ratio, etc. Shake has some nice buttons to push for all those things. Isn’t your HDV interlaced? Wont’ be so bad if it was 24p, but relax, their 60i appears to be sort of a faked 30/60 sequential or segmented field, being long-GOP where almost everything is synthetic anyway. Really, think about it… only one in 15 frames is an actual recording.

JPO

[Joseph Owens]

In order to extract the VITC-imbedded metadata (which can include keycode footage numbers, record tape TC, and external audio system TC), you usually require a device such as an “Afterburner” which will spit out the numbers.
In your case, you should be able to use Cinema Tools to import the metadata (.FLX) file which should have been generated with your transfer. That data will appear as the secondary codes in FCP.

It is correct that telecines do not insert metadata into the video stream. An onboard (on the telecine) keycode reader (Aaton or Evertz) looks at the barcodes as they fly past — and send that to a downstream key/insert box which becomes an external VITC source, inserted instead of the videotape recorder’s internal VITC generator. Getting these codes correct and in sync can be quite complicated, given the internal frame delays, etc., that can be associated with digital signal paths, recorders, noise reducers, and so on.

Joe

[Joseph Owens]

And they didn’t really intend it to be used as a legalizer, either.

Joe

[Joseph Owens]

What has happened is that FT engineering got caught in transition. Apple changed a bunch of things in FCP and Quicktime. Silicon Color had to change things quickly between versions 2.5 and 2.6, and in the process it looks like a few interchange items (like XML) got broken. Then Apple bought Silicon color, lock, stock, and we got the two smoking barrels. Because there is in practice NO support at the moment, and version 2.7 is a RELEASE CANDIDATE, not a RELEASE, and is not really approved for production (although there a few things rumoured about it that I would like to try out), we as a user community are our own support and frtunately there are still people who are having success with it and are willing to help out those who genuinely feel that it can be made to work.

It is not a toy. It is like a racing car that you a) know how to drive, and b) are a mechanic. If it were a Ferrari, at this point lei ha besogno parlare italiano. But even if you don’t speak the language, a clever person could figure it out.

Yes, I know XML import/export doesn’t work perfectly. It can be made to work, but you aren’t going to ‘no-brainer’ it.

I would’t use SHAKE, either, if I wasn’t prepared to do some prep and climb the learning curve. Not much is explained (very clearly) in it either, and results don’t come for free.

Joe