Acceptable ways of doing 24 -> 29.97 frame rate conversions?

[Dirk DeJonghe]

We are planning to do work for an animation series for children. The basic files we receive are made at 24fps, we need to deliver 25 and 29.97 masters for international television. The 25 fps part is easy, just do a 1:1 conversion and accept the reduced running time. What motion precision is expected in the old NTSC world? The playback of 24 fps into a 29.97 container, how smooth should it be? Do the normal tools in Premiere Pro and After Effects do an adequate job? Any suggestions?

[Tyler Purcell]

Putting 3:2 pulldown into a 24fps clip is actually very easy. FCP, AE, Premiere and Avid can do it on export from a 24 or 23.98 sequence.

[Dirk DeJonghe]

Thanks, Tyler, I was just wondering what quality levels the TV stations expect. Once I made a repair to a damaged frame by freezing the previous frame for one frame, the film was very fine grained, there was no movement whatsoever and it was still rejected by a german TV station. They said it contained a freeze frame, I said it was impossible to see when viewed at normal speed. We had the computer check it they said and it was flagged.

[Perry Paolantonio]

As Tyler says, you need to add 3:2 pulldown. The resulting file is interlaced (since you're repeating fields, not frames) with this pattern. It can be done in a lot of applications, such as After Effects.

[Tyler Purcell]

The resulting file needs to be interlaced. If it's progressive, there will be freeze frames instead of blended fields. In FCP7, you simply put your 24p clip into a 29.97 sequence with an interlaced codec like Pro Res. Then export "same as source" and you should be fine.

[Dirk DeJonghe]

I looked at the delivery specs, it needs to be a 23.98 progressive (a 1:1 from 24 fps with slight sound retime should be OK I think) and a 29.97 progressive from our 24 fps progressive. A pulldown will be generating blended frames or freeze frames as previously discussed.