[Sam Goetz]

The Avid DOES do a true 24p to 50i speed up on playback. You can hear the pitch shift and evaluating frame by frame proves it for sure.

The 24@25 options in FCP as they now stand are unacceptable for our evaluative purposes. It’s not just a matter of not liking it. We need to see the footage as it will look in its final form so that we can send notes back on animation and tweak motion as we go. It’s not just a matter of being picky. 24@25 REPEAT and PULLDOWN look pretty darn awful on movement, and will not allow us to give proper notes to our animators.

Looks like until FCP makes this a function, it’s Avid or HD OFFLINE for us … sigh …

[Sam Goetz]

Dave,

The problem isn’t finishing in 50i. That’s easy. The problem is playing back at the correct speed while we edit and evaluate footage. Exporting our video out of FCP and re-conforming the audio and video every time we need to evaluate motion is not a solution.

PLEASE, FCP, PLEASE LET’S GET 24 @ 25 SPEED UP ON PLAYBACK! WE’RE DYING FOR IT!

[Sam Goetz]

When you conform 24p PAL to 25fps 50i PAL the video is literally SPED UP 4.2% to keep a one-one ratio of one film frame to one video frame. If you decide to double frames or fields to get a 25fps movie that runs at the same duration as a 24fps movie you are going to get stuttery movement that is unacceptable.

I know that audio runs by sample rate and has nothing to do with FPS. What I meant by 24fps audio was audio that was TIMED to the 24fps animatic.

Bottom line: conforming our animation from 24fps to 25fps before we bring it into FCP will speed up our video and destroy our timing and nothing will sync. The only way to maintain timing is to have a 24fps sequence so our animation plays exactly as it was originally TIMED to our audio.

There is no other way to get a 25fps PAL clip that has acceptable movement than to speed it up, that’s why the best way to do this is on playback from a 24fps sequence.

[Sam Goetz]

When I say 24p PAL I mean it not as a format, but as a project set-up. I’m definitely aware that PAL is only 50i. What I want is a way to go from 24p to 50i with a speed up on playback like the igniter used to do and the Avid still does.

To ellaborate a little bit more, the reason why I need this speed up on playback instead of converting all my material before hand is that my animation will be coming in at 24fps timed to audio that is impossible to speed up.

Here’s the workflow:

1.) We get script.
2.) We create animatic with recorded dialogue on a 24fps sequence.
3.) We translate animatic into a 24fps timing sheet. It HAS to be 24fps because our animators will not animate at 25fps. It doesn’t work that way.
4.) We get the animation back at 24fps and it lines up perfectly with our animatic and our audio which is all at 24fps.

If we were to speed up our footage it would not line up with our audio. We cannot speed up our audio to match because it is an OMF and comprised of many different little parts. So, we need our footage to come into a 24fps timeline so it continues to match our initial timing sheets. On playback both video and audio are locked and sped up together and it works.

Make sense?

Thanks for the responses. Any more would be much appreciated.

[Sam Goetz]

Although better than 24@25 REPEAT, 24@25 PULLDOWN is still not ideal. Like I said before, this is animaiton and the motion is very sharp. On fast pans and quick character movement the 24@25 PULLDOWN just looks terrible.

It’s also unacceptable for us to evaluate footage that is not playing back the same way it’ll be playing back when the project is finished.

I did notice that DV PAL looks exceptionally terrible, and looking into it there appears to be somehthing strange about PAL DV fields… If we were to go with FCP we would stay away from DV for our off-lining and probably use Photo-Jpeg or simply stay online at 10-bit. Really, the codec can be anything. If there’s a codec that will allow us to work at 24 sped up to 25 then we’d probably go for it.

What Igniter card supports the speed up, and does it work exactly as it should? Does it speed up the audio as well as the video? Are there known issues with this?

Sam

[Sam Goetz]

The compression is only slightly noticable, but it is definitely there. You can see slight color smear in the intense reds and some slightly jagged edges on high contrast images. Like I said before, none of this is noticable on a TV, but it is noticable in Quicktime.

Either way it doesn’t matter, I’m still getting a luma shift when I go to 75% in QuickTime. So, it still looks like I’m going to do my conversions in FCP.

Thanks for the help.

Sam

[Sam Goetz]

Thanks Graeme, but a quicktime photo-jpeg 75% conversion still gives a noticable luma shift. Also, the compression that comes with 75% is not acceptable for what we’re going for. On a TV it looks much better, but since we’ve got the space for Photo-Jpeg at 100%, might as well go with it.

I think we’re just going to do all of our conversions within Final Cut. Batch export is no big deal, it just ties up our final cut station for longer than we’d like.

Sam

p.s. Your FCP plugins are great. We use them all the time over here!

[Sam Goetz]

I’ve been following this issue on message boards for quite some time finding no solutions until now:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1106846&#1106846

so crazy that this works, but it does! You probably don’t check this thread anymore, but if anyone else comes across it now they can finally solve this bizzare issue.

Sam

[Sam Goetz]

I’m ALSO getting PhotoJpeg luma shifts when converting blackmagic 10-bit into photo-jpeg 100%.

Check this out:

When I capture a 10-bit blackmagic file the luma is perfect, but when I …

… convert to photo-jpeg 100% using quicktime, the image is darker
… convert to photo-jpeg 100% using cleaner, the image is darker
… convert to motion jpeg a or b 100% using quicktime, the image is daker
… convert to photo-jpeg 100% using final cut pro (quicktime conversion, not off a sequence just a straight clip conversion), the image is PERFECT! SAME LUMA!
… if I CAPTURE the clip using the photo-jpeg 100% codec the image is BRIGHTER!

Ideally, I’d like to be able to do these conversions in cleaner or quicktime, but it looks like I’m going to have to do all of them from within Final Cut. What’s up with this disparity? Doesn’t final cut use quicktime to convert its movies? Why would they produce different results?

I’m on a G5 with blackmagic SD extreme card Final Cut Pro 5. Latest blackmagic drivers. Latest FCP updates.

Thanks,
Sam