[Nicholas Monsour]

Thank you George for your detailed response.

I realized the day after I posted that my clips that I reverse telecined with Cinema Tools looked strange because I was still viewing them in a 29.97 fps timeline (which is what FCP refers to NTSC video as). When I put them in a new sequence set to 23.98, they looked pretty good.

I also realized that the interlacing of the quicktimes wasn’t my biggest problem with the footage imported into FCP. It was the double frames that result from bringing the raw 24p 1080i footage in, because the duplicate frames that the HVX creates to embed the footage in the 60i stream hadn’t been removed — as they would have been automatically in 24pA footage.

So, I bit the bullet and re-imported everything, then batch reverse telecined everything in Cinema Tools, and I am now recreating my assembly edit.

My reasons for doing this are:
1. I have the opportunity to screen this on an HD progressive projector, and so I am making a 23.98 HDCAM master.
2. There is some digital compositing being done to some clips, and the compositor can’t work with interlaced, or double-framed footage.

And when you say that maybe 720 24p would have been better — I did do tests with both formats and I can clearly see the difference. This was a shoot with a lot of attention paid to lighting and detail in the set, and I am glad I shot 1080 (especially since I am screening on a full size movie screen and will be submitting to festivals that screen this way as well). I think the Panasonic HVX 720 looks very good, and is very easy to work with in post, but the 1080 is, in my eyes, far superior visually. My biggest mistake was just not researching how I would have to treat the clips in editing with the 24p normal footage, and there isn’t really anyone at my school who has had the experience to help me with this. I have to explain this stuff to my teachers!

So thanks again. I wont really know if I’ve done this right until I see it on the big screen, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

-Nick