[Tony Markward]

Thanks for the tip Jerry. One of the systems in question was not a clean install, but the others were all clean (and sometimes re-clean installed several times by the edit house to try to address the problems).

Perhaps it’s a long form thing, since I’ve had far fewer problems with shorter shows. I guess I’ll just keep plugging.

[Tony Markward]

Thanks Michael. I know that on my last show, the sound people offered to record at 23.98 to DVDRAM, so some people are doing it.

And yes, the reel names I can work around with the search and replace option in a text editor.

Know of any 3rd party apps that I can use to accurately convert my EDL?

Also, I really would like to know if I can do all this from within FCP/Cinema Tools. Am I just missing something? Or is it as hard as it appears?

[Tony Markward]

I tried it both ways: 0 to 1023 and 64 to 940. Same result.

[Tony Markward]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I notice that no one offered any experience comparing output from a Fire, Flame, or other expensive post house solution to any of the cheaper more DIY options discussed. Is that because there is no difference? Or because no one has had a chance to A/B the two?

I said earlier that I had managed to produce decent results in FCP. Alas, last night I noticed that every fifth frame jumped a little bit. The motion seemed off, though there didn’t seem to be any interlace related frame blending problems.

I went to AE instead, as Jeremy had suggested, and ended up with much smoother results. No hopping frame. My Twixtor result in FCP seemed even smoother, but showed some field-related artifacting. I couldn’t figure out how to use FieldKits in combination with Twixtor in FCP. Using FieldKits by itself to deinterlace to 60p; and then reconform to 24p, I ended up with the hopping frame. When I tried to add Twixtor to my FieldKitted 24p or 60p sequences, I ended up with a mess. I haven’t yet tried Twixtor in AE, although the workflow seems like it should be simpler to use the 2 in tandem than in FCP.

I tried Smoothcam before I went to Twixtor, and got fairly mediocre results. Not as nice as AE or Twixtor. But maybe I’m missing something about the Motion workflow.

Has anyone compared the Shake retiming capability with the After Effects/Twixtor method? I would consider getting Shake if it’s better, but I already have AE.

Thanks again

[Tony Markward]

Thanks for the suggestions.

In the interim, I tried the following workflow, which seems similar to the AE method Jeremy proposed.

I drop my 60i clip twice into a 59.94 timeline in FCP 6. I drop that sequence into another 59.94 sequence (as required by FieldsKit or Twixtor). Then I apply the FieldsKit deinterlace plugin to the nested clip and select the “2x FPS” option in the plug in. I render the effect, then export this clip to a QT 59.94 movie, then import that movie back into FCP. Finally, I drop the clip into a 23.98 sequence in Final Cut.

I get very nice Slo Mo @ about 40 percent speed, but the video is definitely a little soft (and not in a motion blur sort of way, it doesn’t seem). My rendering settings are all set to highest quality, and I’m working in 1920×1080 ProRes HQ.

Anything I can do to improve the softness of my result? Or is softness just the price you pay for trying to do this with interlaced video instead of film?

Thanks again.

[Tony Markward]

Anybody have any news on this issue? Working on a feature with lots and lots of media files that I have to move onto different drives for people to work on, and I’m getting tired of reconnecting them in random instancess one by one.

[Tony Markward]

Anybody have any news on this issue? Working on a feature with lots and lots of media files that I have to move onto different drives for people to work on, and I’m getting tired of reconnecting them in random instancess one by one.

[Tony Markward]

Thanks for the advice, Nick. So as long as I don’t change the media file names, relinking won’t automatically become a big mess. That’s the answer I was hoping for.

Any other pointers appreciated.

[Tony Markward]

Thanks for the comments!

I will go with an 8 Bit timeline

[Tony Markward]

Does the Beta colorspace apply to Digibeta as well? Or just analog Betacam?

Thanks