Posts filed under 'Editing'
Right now I’m participating in the first “OpenCut” project, which is a great idea unfortunately saddled with an awful script. Basically some very clever people came up with a great way to give people access to footage shot with the exciting new Red One camera. I’ve been following the development of the camera and went to NAB NY last year to see some 4K Red footage projected. It was very pretty. But I haven’t worked with any producers or directors crazy enough to try it out on a film yet. There are definitely still a lot of limitations and a lot of bugs to be worked out, but the promise of the system is incredible.
So the OpenCut people shot a short film on the Red One and they’re giving the footage to anyone who pays the very reasonable $25 fee. I just got my hard drive in the mail today and I’m currently transcoding everything into ProRes HQ and syncing up the audio.
Here’s why ProRes HQ. You see, Red shoots in a kind of RAW format, like digital still cameras can do. It retains metadata regarding exposure and whatnot, but you can adjust that after it’s shot. It’s all very fancy, but I don’t want to spend my time grading the image before I edit. You end up wasting a lot of time on footage that you won’t use. That’s why you do a quick one-light telecine when you’re working on film. I just want to start working on the footage as soon as possible. You can’t edit straight from the “RAW” (actually .r3d) files, but the camera automatically generates QT reference (proxy) files of various resolutions. You can edit using those proxies, but it requires access to the original r3d files and a lot of processing power. My quad-core 3 gHz processor is around 90% on all cores while playing back one of those files. I can add some real-time effects in there too, but it makes me uneasy. So I’m going with something I know. I know ProRes HQ is great, and my processor barely breaks a sweat once it’s transcoded.
I’m doing the transcoding using the Red Log and Transfer Plugin, which works just like those old-fashioned P2 cards. You open up the original folders and start transcoding the clips you want. FCP creates a master clip and generates the new media on your scratch disk. I noodled around with RedAlert, which seemed nice, but had more controls than I wanted, and I tried RedCine, which was completely baffling, and usually froze up on me. I never even managed to figure out how to export a clip (UPDATE: Hit the big red “Go” button). The Log and Transfer Plugin is definitely the simple way to go.
I’ve looked at some of the footage, and I started syncing the audio. For some reason it was recorded at 44.1 kHz, so I have to be careful to change my sequence settings to match. There are no scene numbers either, which I guess makes sense for such a short film and for a project that will be edited by different people in presumably wildly different ways, but it threw me a bit. Every shot is assigned a number, although luckily it’s not in shooting order like they do in the foreign lands (a confusing system obviously not designed by an editor). It’s in order based on the script / storyboards as far as I can tell.
As for the script, the less said about it the better. I’m going to do my best to turn the movie into something completely different.
May 31st, 2008
I’m back from Amsterdam and we’ve finished editing La Commedia. A few weeks ago I described the basic setup we were working with. The whole thing worked beautifully. We almost never rendered anything. There were times when playing back a freeze frame while 2 other video streams were running would cause dropped frames, but that just required a quick render on the 8-core Mac Pro we were working on. The finale of the show finally uses all 5 screens at once in a seizure-inducing extravaganza that also included some effects, so that needed rendering as well. But for the majority of the show I was able to edit up to 4 streams of resized HD video in realtime.
This is an example of the format we used during editing. Each picture represents one of the 5 screens that will be in various locations throughout the theater. The “C” screen is not in use in this example.
The real difficulty in this project was creative. The opera doesn’t really have a clear narrative like a traditional opera. It’s more fragments of ideas that all relate to a theme. Hal Hartley, the director of the show, came up with a separate story for the film that was inspired by the ideas in the opera. But while there’s a clear relationship between the two, the film is definitely not just an illustration of what the people are singing about on stage. And I usually had no idea what anyone was singing about anyway since we edited to MIDI recordings of the score.
As we started editing there were a lot more decisions to be made than usual. In a movie you can take for granted the fact that you’re going to have an image on screen most of the time. You might have a few seconds of black here and there, but in general movies tend to have something going on all the time. But with a stage production, you might not have any video at all for several minutes while the audience focuses on some activity on the stage. And if we do want to show some video, we have 5 different screens to choose from. And some portions of the audience can’t see some of the screens. Some of the audience sees the back side of some of the screens, so the image is in reverse and we can’t put text on those screens. It was all very tricky.
But we persevered and in the end came up with something that I’m really proud of. We finished editing after 4 weeks and then started the complicated work of handing over the video to the stage management crew. For each portion of video on each screen we had to determine at what point in the score the video should start and end, and what should happen if the video ends before we get to the out point in the score. Since it’s live music, the orchestra is going to play at slightly different speeds every night, and generally will play it slower than the MIDI recording. Usually we planned to have the video freeze on the last frame and wait until the next cue comes along.
I then broke the video down by screen and cue. Whenever there was a start or stop cue in the music I created a separate timeline.
I then nested each of the timelines by screen. All of the “A” cues were nested in one timeline, and so on. I put about a second of black between each one, making sure that each started at 00 frames just to make typing in the timecode simpler.
I then output each of the timelines to a separate Doremi V1 hard drive recorder via SDI from the Kona 3 card. Screen A was an HD V1 and screens B-E were downconverted to anamorphic PAL SD. Each screen’s timecode started on a different hour to avoid confusion.
Once all the video was on the hard drives, I output EDLs which had stop and start timecode for each of the nested clips. Peter, who will handle video playback during the performances, then entered the timecode into the Doremi machines to create separate clips that can be recalled automatically and can stop when they finish, or loop as needed.
We then played the MIDI recordings in a room with the stage managers and Peter and 5 LCD monitors. The stage managers started to get the hang of where in the music the video stops and starts, and Peter figured out the exact requirements for each cue’s stop and start, and what comes before and after. We then had Rutger come in to program a Medialon show control system in order to automate the stopping and starting and looping and freezing. That way you can do multiple things with one press of the button. For example, one cue could require simultaneously starting video on 3 different screens, which is not easy for one person to do. Eventually it all came down to about 60 cues in the Medialon system.
And then I flew home the next day. There’s a month of rehearsals and then I’m going back to watch the premiere in June.
May 15th, 2008
Ever since Media Composer was released as a software-only option (no longer requiring expensive Avid hardware) I’ve had a hard time understanding why it cost so much more than Xpress Pro, considering the complete compatibility between them, and the large overlap in features. I didn’t see much need to upgrade to Media Composer myself. Well, apparently Avid is done with Xpress Pro, and they’re slashing the price of Media Composer. I think this is a great move. It puts Media Composer much closer to the price of Final Cut Studio, and removes the vestigial Xpress Pro line. It’s getting so cheap, I might even buy a Mojo some day.
March 18th, 2008
Film lists. Like film itself, they are on the way out. When we did Lake City we shot on super-16mm and transferred all of the negatives to HDCAM-SR with 10-bit log color. We edited with downconverted DVCAM tapes, then did an online using timecode. Since it was edited on an Avid, and I used ALEs from the lab to batch capture the DVCAMs, keycode was also tracked automatically. It was good to have around, in case for some reason we had to re-transfer something from s16, but in the end the HDCAM-SR tapes were our master tapes. And obviously if you originate in HD you don’t have any film to track. So believe it or not, in all the modestly budgeted films I’ve worked on, I’ve never had to deal with film lists before.
There are still some times when you need to track film. If you shoot 35mm, you might cut negative and make a print the old-fashioned way without a DI. In that case you’re going to be using keycode like crazy. You’ll probably conform a workprint before you cut your negatives too. Or if you shoot 35mm and do a DI, you’ll benefit from the increased resolution of 2K and 4K. At the moment it is not cost-effective to scan in all your dailies at 2K, and certainly not at 4K. So in that case your DI facility will have to scan the negatives from a film list that you generate.
But I’ve recently been working on a movie shot on s16 and transferred straight to DVCAM. It was then edited in FCP. I was not involved in the project until they brought me in at the hand-off to the sound editors when it became clear that there were problems. Final Cut Pro is a great piece of editing software, but it’s so flexible that if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you can get in trouble fast.
The first problem is working with film shot at 24 fps and telecined at 23.98, and trying to synchronize it with BWFs (Broadcast WAV files, which are WAV files with timecode) from a digital sound recorder. One way to avoid this hassle is to conform all the video to 24.0 fps using Cinema Tools. But it’s really best not to do that. Sound editors don’t like it, and you’ll have some trouble viewing on an external NTSC monitor or outputting to tape. It’s best to keep everything at “video speed.”
The easiest thing is to have the lab sync your dailies during telecine. But maybe you can’t afford that. So here’s the workflow. I think. I don’t actually have personal experience doing this, I’ve only figured it out for the benefit of other people. So your results may vary. Do a test before you get too far.
Ideally, record sound on-set at 29.97 NDF, 48048 Hz, but stamp it at 48000 Hz. Your sound guy should understand this. When you import the BWFs, FCP will automatically slow them down by .1% (allegedly)
If you’ve arrived at this page too late, and your sound is not recorded that way, it’s not too late for you. If you recorded straight up 48 kHz, you can re-stamp your sound using the BWF Restamp Tool which was designed for Avid editors, but will work for FCP too. It should go without saying that you should make a backup of your original sound files before messing around with them. I am told but haven’t done this myself, that you should restamp audio recorded at 48 kHz to 47952 Hz. Try importing that into FCP. If it’s still drifting out of sync, try using BWF2XML on those restamped files then try importing to FCP again. If that doesn’t work, experiment with the workflow a little. Try restamping at 48048. Sebsky Tools‘ BWF2QT is another option that might work.
Let’s take another detour to understand better what’s happening with all this re-stamping business. When you convert the analog sound waves generated by the world into digital signals, they are sampled at a particular rate. Movie audio is generally sampled 48,000 times per second. So in any given second, the sound wave has 48,000 data points. The bit-depth of the audio (usually 16-bit, but increasingly 24-bit) determines the precision of that data point, or how much data is used to describe the amplitude of the wave. In the graph to the right, time is the x-axis, and amplitude is the y-axis. As you increase the number of points on the x-axis, the staircase effect will get smaller, and the digital audio (represented by the gray shape) will get closer to the smooth shape of the analog audio (represented by the red line).
Now, imagine that graph represents one second of your original sound recording. If, on set, there were 48048 marks made along the x-axis, but FCP is told that there are really only 48000, FCP will only play 48000 of those samples in one second. 48 of them will be played after that second is over. So it takes .1% more time to play your sound than it did in real life. This is what you want.
If, on set, you recorded 48000 samples per second, but you tell FCP that you only recorded 47952 in a second, once again, 48 samples that were in a real-life second get played after the second is over. So again you have effectively slowed the audio down by .1%
Now, on to film lists. Final Cut Pro doesn’t do everything as automatically as Avid does. For reasons I don’t fully understand, Cinema Tools continues to exist as a separate application despite the obvious benefits of just absorbing it into Final Cut Pro. So when you make film lists, you’re actually using Cinema Tools. You can initiate most Cinema Tools actions from FCP, but FCP doesn’t do the database work.
The first step is to import the log files from your telecine session. You need to have these. Either FLX (flex) or ALE files are crucial for maintaining accurate data for all your clips. I prefer to use ALE files. In FCP, start by selecting File > Import > Cinema Tools Telecine Log… Hit the “New Database” button and create a new database for your film. Make sure you select the proper options for film standard, video TC rate, etc. Your options will depend on the project.
Once you’ve made the new database, choose the ALE file to import. If everything goes well, you will now have several offline clips in FCP, and a corresponding list of database entries in Cinema Tools. You’ll need to open up Cinema Tools and open the new database to see that list. Now, put those FCP clips into their own bin and batch capture them. An hour or so later, you now have 29.97 files. Select them all, and click Tools > Cinema Tools Reverse Telecine. Cinema Tools will magically remove the extra fields and you’ll be left with 23.98 fps progressive video. This takes a while too.
Now I’m not sure, because I’m still doing this workflow theoretically, but I believe at this point you should select all these clips and click Tools > Synchronize with Cinema Tools. Uncheck the “Add new records” field but keep “Auto connect” checked. This should connect your media files with the database entries. Once you’ve done that, open the database in Cinema Tools and double click on one of the records. You should see a window with the video on the left and the various pieces of metadata related to that entry on the right. Pick an arbitrary spot in the middle of the video and verify that the burn-in on the picture matches the keycode numbers on the right. If they don’t match, fix them, and click save. If you have to do that a lot, you have a real problem and should hire me at a reasonable weekly rate. You don’t have to check every clip, but do a spot check of a couple clips for every tape. If you’ve made any changes, select the clips you changed in FCP, and click Tools > Synchronize with Cinema Tools to update the data in FCP. If you don’t need to make any changes to the keycode, you can check it from FCP by turning on timecode overlays and turning on the check mark next to View > Timecode Overlays > Keycode.
Repeat these steps for every ALE you get. Put it all in the same database.
Now you’re free to edit, and forget that Cinema Tools even exists.
Months later, you’ve finished editing your movie and it’s time to go back to the film. Now select your sequence and click File > Export > Cinema Tools Film List. There are a lot of options here, and your negative cutter or DI Facility will tell you what you should choose. Chances are they will be upset that you edited in FCP, but it’s too late to turn back at this point. Make sure you select the right database. This will generate a PDF that you can read. Check a few shots on the list against the keycode overlay in your project. You might also need to export a Cinema Tools XML Film List. There are fewer options for that one.
Now, sit back and enjoy the riches that come so easily from an independent film.
March 14th, 2008
I was working on a movie in Avid Xpress Pro (on Windows XP) recently and I figured it was time to finally get some equipment so I (and a client) could watch the video on an external monitor. A DV deck is the usual way. You hook up the deck to the computer via firewire, the deck translates the DV to analog, you hook your TV into the deck and you’ve got NTSC video. Trouble is, I have very little use for a deck. Most projects I edit these days come to me already on a hard drive. DV tape is obviously on its way out, and spending $2000 on a deck I won’t be using much longer seems a little silly.
I was hoping to get an Intensity Pro. I didn’t need to capture or output any tapes, so that seemed ideal since it could also handle HD. But then I remembered that Avid doesn’t play well with others. Avid only works with Avid DNA products like the Mojo. The Mojo is essentially a glorified digital/analog converter that also adds 2:3 pulldown to 24p video in realtime and retails for $1700. It’s worth noting that Final Cut Pro adds 2:3 pulldown for free.
I considered a D/A converter, but they all run around $200 and don’t have any tape decks, in case I do need to capture a tape here and there. Eventually I decided that a cheap camcorder was my best option. First I got a $160 Canon camcorder. With Avid Xpress Pro I was getting a 16 frame delay and often drifting out of sync, which I assumed was because it was a cheap piece of crap. I returned it and got a $190 Sony DCR-HC28 since I’ve had such good experiences with Sony decks. I still get the 16 frame delay with the Sony camcorder, but I don’t have the drifting problem. I was working on a different project in Final Cut Pro, so I booted up the Mac OS to see what the delay would be. Turns out it’s only 2 frames, which is what I usually expect from FCP with a firewire deck. That really surprised me since it’s the same computer. From what I’ve read in online forums, the 16 frame delay is standard for Avid without a DNA like the Mojo. I’ve turned on desktop play delay, which keeps the video in sync, but it makes editing a bit more difficult.
I don’t have any plans to start shooting home movies, so I can’t say anything about the image quality of the camera. I can only assume it’s horrible.
February 19th, 2008
In the past I’ve surveyed the many issues of editing 24p video in a 60i world. A recent comment on that page reminded me that there’s another option that I hadn’t discussed.
Shoot 24p. It looks great. Once you’ve shot it in 24p, you’re never going to lose the “filmic” quality of the motion that you get from shooting progressive frames. Because you can only get interlaced video on a DV tape, what’s on your tape is now interlaced, but it’s interlaced in the same way that The Matrix is interlaced when it’s shown on standard definition TV. It still looks like The Matrix, it doesn’t look like the 11 o’clock news just because it’s interlaced.
Editing in 24p can be tough. If you don’t really understand what you’re doing you can end up causing a lot of unnecessary trouble. So you can edit in regular old 29.97 NTSC. You probably won’t see the difference. The one time I see a problem with footage that was shot 24p but edited at 29.97 is playing on my HDTV. My TV is a progressive scan monitor. It automatically detects 3:2 pulldown and removes it from the video, which results in a nice progressive picture. This works best when the video has a continuous pulldown cadence. A film that is telecined has pulldown added in the same cadence throughout, so once the TV picks up the cadence, its work is done. The same is true for videos shot and edited in 24p. However, a video shot at 24p and edited at 29.97 has a pretty good chance (80% I think) of changing its cadence on every cut. So after every cut I see a few frames of interlaced video before the TV figures out the new cadence.
The good news is, nobody else notices this.
My advice is, if you’re going crazy trying to figure out how to edit 24p video, do yourself a favor and skip it. NTSC 29.97 works just fine.
February 18th, 2008
For me 2007 was the year of HD. I bought an HDTV, but more importantly, I edited a number of videos on my own computer in HD. It’s kind of old news for a lot of people, but it turns out DVCPro HD is a great format that you can play back from a regular old hard drive without any fancy RAIDs. In the past I’ve insisted on sticking with DV because I didn’t trust a regular old hard drive to reliably play back HD video. And at least on a feature film there’s always going to be an online assembly at the end anyway, so the advantages of working in HD are generally not as great as the hassles. One feature I worked on last year was edited with 14:1 compressed DV on a G4 Avid Meridien, so HD was beyond out of the question. It literally took an hour just to output one reel of the DV reference quicktimes for the sound editors. But despite the old-fashioned tech in the offline, we did the online in 4:4:4 1920×1080 at a post house, and it ended up looking terrific. I always say that in the end offline editing is just about generating a list of numbers for the online anyway.
But working in DVCPro HD has really opened my eyes. For one thing, it made my pretty nice 2-year-old AMD X2 3800 computer seem way too slow. Rendering times were unacceptably high. I’ve just upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz system with 4GB of DDR2 RAM and I’ve seen some real performance increases. Rendering titles is much improved, and realtime HD effects work really well. Of course, I’m still limited by slow hard disk speeds, but now I have 4 eSATA connections (2 built-in to the back of the motherboard and 2 from an SATA to eSATA bracket) which ensures that on the newer external drives I don’t have any Firewire interfaces slowing anything down.
All of the DVCPro HD projects I’ve worked on have been short, and came from P2 cards; my new favorite things. If there’s one thing that annoys me the most about editing, it’s real-time capture. It’s too slow!!! P2 cards copy faster than real-time, and generally have to be loaded onto hard drives during production, so in many cases I get a hard drive all ready to edit without having to load anything into the computer. This is the way of the future. In FCP there’s still some futzing around with conversion from the MXF format on the P2 cards to QT files, which seems like something that won’t last long. Avid loads MXFs without any conversion, which I find very cool.
We edited Blind Date using XDCAM. In this case it was PAL DV saved as MXF files to XDCAM discs, which are basically Blu-Ray discs in a cartridge. All I did was copy the files from the discs to a hard drive and we were ready to go. It was at least twice as fast as real-time capture, possibly faster. My favorite part was syncing up the 3-camera shoot. Everything had the same timecode, so it was a snap to group every bin using AutoSync.
The big new thing that I haven’t tried yet is Apple’s ProRes codec. I’ve done a little bit of testing and it seems to work really well and really fast, but I haven’t done any serious editing with it. It looks like I’ll have a chance in April when I’ll be editing HD video for an opera in Amsterdam with Hal Hartley. Everything will be shot in HDCAM and we’re going to capture straight to ProRes HQ and edit with that throughout the process. At the end it all needs to be converted to MPEG-2 for the playback hardware installed in the theater, so ProRes seems ideal. I will of course post more as I learn more.
January 12th, 2008
I should have done this earlier, but here’s my distribution package for the FCP cue sheet generating script I wrote for Fay Grim. This script generates the old-timey audio cue sheets that were necessary in the old days when people mixed on dubbers and dinosaurs ruled the earth. They do not generate the music cue sheets which are often required delivery items in distribution contracts. You should really just suck it up and do that manually. If you’re working in Pro Tools and have the ability to export text versions of sessions (usually requires something like the DV Toolkit) then you should try Agent Orange.
These are the instructions (which are also included in the zip file)
- Upload the contents of the Zip file to an empty directory on a server where you can run PHP. Most web hosts allow you to run PHP. Give it a shot.
- In FCP export an XML file of the sequence you want to generate a cue sheet for.
- Upload the XML file to the same directory you uploaded the script to.
- In Safari (Firefox and IE don’t work) enter the url of the directory where you uploaded the script plus the text “?file=filename.xml” where filename.xml is the filename of the XML file you uploaded. For example: http://www.15framespersecond.com/cue_sheet/?file=Reel 5.xml will generate a cue sheet for Reel 5.xml
- Adjust the options to fit your needs, then print.
- If you’ve uploaded more than one XML file you can select them from the dropdown list at the top of the screen.
I only made the script for my own purposes and I hope some other people get some use out of it. I do not have the time or the interest to provide tech support so the script is provided “as is.” Feel free to modify the source code as you see fit.
August 20th, 2007
There is a lot of hearsay, rumor, and innuendo floating around about working with Panasonic’s fancy HVX-200 camera. I have fairly limited experience with it, but I thought I’d throw in my impressions of the best workflow options.
Shoot 720pn on the biggest P2 cards you can afford. Considering the astronomical cost of P2 media, we’re back in the old days where storage space is a limiting factor. Now, the sensor on the camera is 960×540, and it uses fancy methods to squeeze some extra resolution to get to 960×720 (the actual resolution of the 720pn footage). If you go up to 1080p24, tests have shown you do get a slightly better picture, but at the expense of halving the amount of footage you can fit on a P2 card. You’re already getting something really good at 720pn and unless you’re a fanatic about resolution you might not even see the difference. Shooting at 1080p24 also means the files on tape have 3:2 pulldown added in, which is just taking up space and you’ll have to remove the pulldown before you start editing.
Have a laptop on set with a PC card slot. There are a lot of products out there that will read P2 cards or hook up directly to your camera via firewire but I find them dodgy. I don’t like extra steps. The old PowerBooks (before Intel) had PC card slots, as do most PC laptops, although many of them don’t have firewire ports. (UPDATE: You can get a “Duel Systems” (sic) adapter to plug the cards into a MacBook Pro) Hook up a firewire drive to your laptop and you’ve got yourself a perfect transfer station. You might need some drivers, which you can get from Panasonic. Just pop the full P2 card out of the camera, put it in the card slot on the computer, then copy it to a clearly labeled folder on the firewire drive. Come up with your own folder system, but keep it clear and consistent like you would with camera rolls or tapes. Then erase the entire contents of the P2 card and put it back in the camera. You should have at least 2 cards so you can keep shooting while you copy. (Another update: According to Shane Ross, you can’t just delete the cards anymore, you have to use a P2 card formatter, which you can get from Panasonic.)
You need an extra crew member. Unfortunately you’re going to need someone who only pays attention to media management on set. Trying to split up the job can lead to lost footage, which is bad. The best person to have on set is an assistant editor or the editor. That way things can be organized exactly how they want it. If the post-production staff can’t do it, you’ll need an additional person who knows computers.
Make a backup. Look, hard drives crash all the time. And they’re really, really cheap. Buy an extra one and backup as often as possible.
Edit with new versions of FCP or Avid. P2 is bleeding-edge stuff. Don’t waste your time trying to make it work with FCP 3. It just doesn’t work. And I’m sure those upstarts like Premiere Pro and Vegas are just fine, but why are you making everything so difficult? Avid has the advantage of working natively with MXF so you don’t do any transcoding, but because there’s no tape name associated with the files there’s a lot of worry about what happens when things go offline. I haven’t had enough experience working with P2 in Avid to dismiss any of those fears, so proceed with caution.
August 20th, 2007
I got an email from my old friend Mr. Taj Musco last week. I made my first real movie “Is This the Pizzaman?” with Taj after my freshman year of college. It was shot on S-VHS and edited tape-to-tape at our local cable access facility.
Taj was having trouble with some footage he shot in 24p advanced that was getting all wonky when he made a DVD or output to DV. Taj is a smart guy, and he had troubleshooted like crazy, but he was stumped. I also used to see a lot of confusion about 24p on the Apple FCP forums when I used to frequent that place. There was one heartbreaking story of an assistant editor who had captured PAL tapes at 24fps thinking that the timecode would match their masters when it was time to online. They didn’t. Don’t do that. Edit at 25 fps.
Here’s the thing. Editing in 24p is endlessly confusing. Let’s start with the term 24p. It means two different things! It can mean 24.0 fps, which is the speed that film runs at, or it can mean 23.98 fps, which is the speed that NTSC video runs at. If you shoot any 24p on a video camera, you’re shooting at 23.98 fps. The exception to that is HDCAM format, which can shoot at 24.0 fps. But the only good reason I can think of to do that is if you’re mixing it with mostly film footage.
Let’s assume for the moment that you shot 23.98 video. Most of you reading this did that. If you didn’t shoot HDCAM or on an HVX-200 (a camera which will get its own post soon) then what you actually have is regular old 29.97 NTSC interlaced video.
“But! BUt! BUT!” You shout. “! Didn’t I shoot 24p? I want to be like a real filmmaker and junk.” Yes you did. But DVCPRO and DV tapes record NTSC or PAL video. What the camera does is the same sneaky trick that you do in telecine. It’s called pulldown. It takes those 24 frames and spreads them out into 30. It doesn’t just play them slower, because that would look like slow motion. Instead it duplicates some of the 24 frames in a set pattern. It’s beyond the scope of this post to explain how it works. Look up telecine in wikipedia. It’s fascinating stuff if you’re a huge nerd like me.
If you’re working in Final Cut Pro, you DON’T CAPTURE 23.98 VIDEO. You capture regular old NTSC. If you shot 24p “advanced” then you capture NTSC but turn on the check box for removing advanced pulldown. Then you EDIT at 23.98 because your clips have been converted back to 23.98 during capture. If you shot in regular 24p, then capture NTSC and use Cinema Tools to remove the pulldown. If all goes well you should be able to just do a batch reverse telecine and then reconnect your clips to the new ones.
It’s a really good idea to check your clips at this point for any remaining interlaced frames. If you’re playing out to an NTSC monitor you’ll see it right away. It stutters like it’s duplicating half-frames, which is exactly what it’s doing. You’ll see it right away. If you’re poor and don’t have a way to output to an NTSC monitor, just open up some of your clips in Cinema Tools and step through the video using the left and right arrow keys. Try it on a part of the clip with lots of movement. If you see any interlacing at all you’ve done something wrong. Don’t start editing until you see only progressive frames.
And just to clear up some confusion, there is no real difference between footage shot in 24p advanced and 24p regular. It’s only a question of the workflow outlined above. You can easily blow up either one to film assuming you’ve removed the pulldown properly.
March 1st, 2007
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