[Todd Faulkner]

I’ve been wrestling with this very problem. We shot 720 24p footage, but it captured to a Firestore at 60p (it was a new piece of equipment and we were still figuring it out). In addition, on some days I did not get the “reference movie” and had all of my takes broken up into clips that all equalled 2 minutes and 18 seconds.

The 60p video plays 24 frames per second if you drop it in a 24p timeline, but for some reason, FCP doesn’t always drop the correct frames in the timeline (many takes come across as if they were 12p). So it looks stuttery. And there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which takes are affected.

My solution was to arrange the footage in the timeline by location/scene, and then convert the video on the clips to 24p using the DVCPro frame rate converter — I then replaced the 60p video with the new 24p version (with properly synched audio) and output all of the footage into full quality DVCPro HD master scene clips. That’s what I’ll edit my project from.

Admittedly, it’s a bit of a work-around, but playback is smooth and gorgeous (and it looks to me like any loss in resolution is negligible).