Reverse Telecine Nightmare

[Alexander McCarron]

I just transferred a film I shot on 16mm to 1080i HD to a hard drive at NFL films. The technician told me that I should remove the 3:2 pull down with Cinema Tools when I got home and something about "A frames". I have tried every setting they have in Cinema Tools and every time what I get back is choppy video.

 

I just want to have a version of this film small enough to fit on a DVD with some other short films and to be able to upload it online without interlacing lines.

 

I'm under the gun too, I need to get this done ASAP.

 

I'm so stressed it's making me stupid.

 

PLEASE HELP!

[Alexander McCarron]

I should add that it plays the telecined footage just fine, I don't think it's just that the computer is slow.

[Michael Palzkill]

I shot a short film this past winter on a JVC HD200 with the Red Rock adapter. We shot it at 720p24, then captured it at 1080i30 in ProRes. Along with the interlacing, it introduced the pulldown effect you're talking about, which was very obvious. After a lot of trial and error, we finally found a solution that worked great for us - I think it was either on Creative Cow or an Apple forum.

 

We took the sequence from Final Cut into compressor and threw the Apple ProRes for Progressive Material (either the regular or HQ - your choice) setting on it. Not sure how it works with other settings. From there, go into the inspector below where the file/settings "main" window is, and go into the encoder section (second box from the left). There, change your frame rate to custom and in it, put 23.976. Once you're done with that, go one box to the right (frame controls) and turn frame controls on. Then, where it says deinterlace, change that to reverse telecine. As far as I can remember, and just looking at the settings, that's all we touched.

 

Obviously, if you do this ProRes, the file you'll end up with will be much bigger than you want, but you can then compress it down to DVD size for whatever you need. Not sure if this is the "best" solution to your answer, but it might be worth a try. It worked great for us. Hopefully it'll work.