[Monica Summerville]

I agree that the Nattress Converters work really well on good footage. However, I sometimes remove titles & graphics from the final edit, pre conversion, and then recreate them to match the final standard (e.g. if done in Photoshop for example), and then edit them back along with the Nattress converted video. Graham Nattress the creator of these filters, is usually pretty helpful if you contact him with problems using his filters. They are not free, but then probably good value as compared to your time…

[Monica Summerville]

That’s interesting that you don’t believe the deck is at fault… I’m trying to get in touch with the previous editor (to warn her if nothing else) but I’ll see if she’s had other problems.

So if not the deck, then how else could PAL footage end up with less than 25 FPS? I see someone asked if you had multiple firewire devices attached… is he worried about some sort of throughput issue? Another post I read said that a close to full capture drive could mean dropped frames when digitising but could it also cause this? Any thoughts appreciated.

Also as for workarounds… when you said you used Compressor, did you mean you used the Conform function?

Thanks.

[Monica Summerville]

I’m seeing something similar but with PAL miniDV tapes captured using a Sony DSR-11 deck (via firewire). This is on a client site and they’ve successfully captured hours and hours of footage with this setup. The computer belongs to them but the deck belongs to an editor they work with often (so the deck is not here any more).

But with the last batch of tapes a few drift out of sync when viewed within FCP (either in Viewer or sequence). FCP clip properties however show all the right numbers for frame rate and audio info. However when opened in QT, some of the drifting clips, the Inspector information shows FPS figures other than 25 (mostly 23.xx but one is 12.xx!)

Even more strange however is that some of the clips with a “wrong” FPS still play OK in FCP, i.e. they do not drift.

The client thinks maybe the previous editors’ deck was faulty and wants to recapture using another deck they own. The question is should they redigitise ALL the tapes that show anything other than 25 as a FPS in QT, or just the ones that are drifting in FCP?

I am unclear as to why any clips with the ‘wrong’ FPS (as shown in QT) should be OK when viewed in FCP. I’d like to understand this better before I recommend to the client that they spend money & time redigitising all the tapes.

Thanks for your thoughts!