[Mark Spano]

[Daniel Edelman] “The most annoying part is that you can’t tell what frame rate the DA-88 was recorded at.”

As far as I remember, on a DA-98, there’s a TC menu where you have System TC and Tape TC. System is how your deck is set, and Tape TC is what’s actually on tape.

[Mark Spano]

Sounds similar to a problem I had a long time ago with a KONA 3 card. It would start playing with video and audio in sync and slowly drift out. Turned out that the card was not in the correct slot in the Mac Pro. Figure out which cards you have and what slots they belong in – AJA has a primer on their site to tell you where the KONA belongs. It might be in a lower performing slot than necessary and therefore unable to handle the throughput of an HQ sequence.

[Mark Spano]

[Lisa Olshanski] “Is there a codec I can use where I won’t lose any quality?”

Your best bet is probably Apple ProRes 422. It holds up very well in exactly this kind of operation (transcoding long-GOP source material to a durable I-frame codec). I would do the log and transfer as you expected to, and then take all of your transferred clips and convert them (with the method I described above) using Apple ProRes 422 as the codec. Once that’s done, you’ll have all of your clips as 29.97, ready to start assembly.

If only this job were a Media Composer job. With AMA for the XDCAM footage and Mix-and-Match for the pulldown insertion, your job would be ready to assemble in seconds…

[Mark Spano]

[Shane Ross] “If you are delivering 29.97, shooting 23.98 makes little sense.”

Actually this is one of the increasingly common production methods being used these days, at least in my neck of the woods. A 23.976 master can be a universal master, and it’s far easier to convert to 29.97 by adding pulldown. With most of my suites being Symphony suites, the universal mastering feature allows for real-time high quality pulldown insertion. In the FCP world, the KONA line makes this easy too. If the OP needs to output a file, Compressor can handle the conversion pretty painlessly as well. It doesn’t take much time, since optical flow isn’t necessary – we aren’t interpolating and creating frames, we’re just duplicating to create fields. Here’s an easy workflow to go from a 23.976p file to a 29.97i file in Compressor, from Jeremy Garchow:

————————————————–

OK, ready? here you go:

Export a ref movie from FCP and open that up in Compressor.

Make a new QT setting and in the Encoder tab hit the video settings button.

Choose the codec of your dreams and the set the frame rate to 29.97, then click OK.

Back in the encoder tab, set the audio drop down menu to Pass Through.

Go to the frame controls tab on turn on frame controls.

Resize, Deinterlace, and Rate Conversions should all be set to Fast, and then turn the Output Fields to Upper Field First (for HD). Duration should be 100%

Leave the filters tab alone unless you want to tweak something there.

In the Geometry tab set the frame size to 100% of source if your movie is full raster HD, if not choose the closest equivalent of full raster (1920 or 1280).

Hit Submit. Wait. Then you have a 29.97 Upper Field first movie with correct 3:2 pulldown. You can now dance the marimba.

Jeremy

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[Mark Spano]

[Juan Palacio] “Also, I was told (by the DP who made this mistake) that you could do a pull down in fcp that would make the footage run at 23.98”

Yes. He forgot to add this to the end of the sentence: “, and it will look terrible, but go for it.”

Seriously, David knows what he’s talking about here. You can try dropping that 29.97 footage into the sequence and if you’re looking at the output, you’ll know right away it’s not gonna cut it.

[Mark Spano]

[Jerry Hofmann] “24p recordings on an HDCAM are really 29.97 with a pulldown added.”

Where did you hear that one? 24p on HDCAM is 23.976 segmented frame. 29.97 doesn’t play into it at all. Images are stored on tape as two identical interlaced fields (segmented frame) but play back as progressive – this is how all (edit)23.976sf(edit) tape formats work.

As far as capturing, I see no reason not to capture to a 24p project. Stay in 24p throughout – no worries about interlacing or frame rate conversions as far as I know.

[Mark Spano]

When I was testing KONA 3 for offsets months ago, I found this info and checked it by AJA and they confirmed it. I created a document for my facility and I’ve copied it below. I apologize for conversions that I did not get to, but this should give a good idea what to look out for.

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KONA 3 Output – Delay Compensation for Video Conversion

When not performing any conversion on resolution or frame rate, the KONA 3 is frame accurate in edit to tape for video and audio.

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When upconverting (for example, 525i29.97 to 1080i29.97 – only resolution, not changing frame rate) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for audio and 1 frame late for video.

To compensate for this, shift video in sequence earlier by one frame.

When downconverting (for example, 1080i29.97 to 525i29.97 – only resolution, not changing frame rate) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for audio and 1 frame late for video.

To compensate for this, shift video in sequence earlier by one frame.
—

—
When converting (1080sf23.976 to 1080i29.97 – adding pulldown only, not changing resolution) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for both video and audio.
—

—
When crossconverting (720p59.94 to 1080i29.97) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for video and audio is one field early in 29.97i.

When downconverting (720p23.976 to 525i29.97) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for video and audio is one field early in 29.97i.

When crossconverting (720p23.976 to 1080i29.97) the output from KONA 3 is frame accurate for video and audio is approximately .4 frame early in 29.97i.

The only true solution to compensate for these types of conversions is to do a separate edit for video (at conversion) and audio (with no conversion), since audio can not easily be shifted accurately by less than a frame in FCP. Or open the audio track in Pro Tools and add the delay time to the beginning of the track, consolidate, and export, then import that into FCP and replace the audio in your sequence with your delay-compensated file.
—

[Mark Spano]

You can try to extract using MKV Tools to an MP4. You’ll still want to run that through Compressor to transcode to ProRes or another FCP-edit-friendly codec. Might be faster than what you’re doing, but I can’t be sure.

[Mark Spano]

Two things to consider:

As long as FCP doesn’t do anything to the bit depth or sampling rate of this file, it should be able to play back correctly. I don’t know if this is true or not.

Also, make sure you set the deck to “cut” instead of “xfade” and to receive “DATA” on that channel pair so the deck doesn’t automatically bit/sample rate convert. There’s a menu item for it on the SR deck (831 – Non Audio data select).

[Mark Spano]

[Michael Hancock] “Beta deck with firewire out (do they even exist?)”

Yes – the J-30 machines from Sony will play BetaSP and have a firewire out. Haven’t tried using it for deck control, but the signal is there…