Archive for category: Editing

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.

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)

1. 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.
2. In FCP export an XML file of the sequence you want to generate a cue sheet for.
3. Upload the XML file to the same directory you uploaded the script to.
4. 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
5. Adjust the options to fit your needs, then print.
6. 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.

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.

Against my better judgment, in addition to the picture editing (see earlier post) I agreed to do the sound editing for Fay Grim under Hal Hartley’s direction. Sound editing is not my first love. I have some ability with it, but it doesn’t get me as excited as picture editing. Usually it makes me bored and crazy. But I got a lot more money out of the whole thing as a result, so that was nice.

As we were editing the picture I kept thinking about how we would make the switch to sound editing. We had an old 1st generation MBox so we could get Pro Tools for $75. But there’s a built-in limitation in all hardware-based sound playback. You can only get X number of sound tracks out of the thing before you have to do a mixdown. In the case of the MBox, that’s 24 tracks. Since we were working with a lot of stereo effects and ambiences, that brought us down to about 14 or so distinct sounds. That’s not enough. I also had problems with stuttering sound and overloaded CPUs, which seemed strange considering we had a top-of-the-line (at the time) dual processor G5 and the MBox was several years old.

So I started looking at software-based solutions. I tried Soundtrack Pro, which came with Final Cut Studio. It seemed like a perfectly capable multitrack sound editor, but it had big problem. It doesn’t export OMFs. Soundtrack Pro was a dead end, unless you brought it back into Final Cut and exported the OMFs from there. More of a cul-de-sac I guess. I didn’t like that idea. It was too cumbersome. I like simple things.

The simplest thing I could think of was doing the sound editing in Final Cut Pro. I thought about it. And thought some more. And the only thing I could come up with that would make that worse than any audio-specific editing system is that it can only edit whole frames, you can’t make those real precise subframe edits. But frankly, that didn’t bother me one bit. And it never came up. And all the filtering and manipulation of sound would be done in the mix, so the only thing we needed to do was put the sounds on the right frames.

The big advantage to sound editing in FCP is that we never had to lock the picture. The picture editing could last for as long as the sound editing and there was no transferring back and forth between programs and no need to worry about making mistakes in the process. With a nice powerful processor, I could play the majority of our sounds without rendering because even if I had 72 tracks (I believe that was the final number) I was never playing 72 sounds at the same time. And when I did need to render, it took only a few seconds.

Finally I exported OMFs. I did two for each reel thanks to that pesky 2 GB file size limit, one with the first 36 tracks and one with the second 36. Then I combined the OMFs in Pro Tools and brought Pro Tools sessions to the mix.

I also spent a week making a program that would generate cue sheets from Final Cut Pro timeline. Hal likes cue sheets, and I was used to them from my student films which were mixed on dubbers like in the old days. The limit of my programming knowledge is using PHP to generate web pages, so I made a PHP script that could parse FCP XML files into cue sheets. It’s not perfect, and it only works in Safari (try printing it with Firefox and you’ll see). Once we got to the mix we realized it was completely useless because everyone could see the Pro Tools layout, and I had laid out the tracks in an intuitive way so we always knew where everything was. Anyway, if you have any need for FCP-generated cue sheets, let me know.