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Shot in 24P, Suddenly in Post it Looks...Eh...


Annie Wengenroth

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Okay, here's the story. I shot this short video on a DVX-100a at 24P. Gave it to my editor who, to my dismay, used Premiere to edit (I'm sorry, I hate Premiere. I think I actually banged my head on my desk when he told me that's what he was going to use). Anyway, something happened between the footage on that miniDV tape and the final product that ended up on my website as well as on DVD. It doesn't look AWFUL considering that it was compressed for the web, it just doesn't look like 24P. And I have to say, that really bums me out. Might I add that the DVD looks quite a bit better, but still not like the original footage.

 

So what happened, is this the fault of the editor using Premiere and not an Avid program like Media Composer or Symphony, which has an automatic pulldown option (or so I've been told; I'm no editor!) ? Or is this something that might have happened during capture into Premiere? OR did things just get screwed up during the compression of the file?

 

If you go here and scroll to the bottom of the page, you can view either an MPEG or a Windows Media file of the final (for now) cut of the movie. The Production Stills section is not up yet because I'm still working on the site in general, but it will be within the next week. This will probably give people a better idea of what it REALLY looks like anyway. :rolleyes:

 

So, if anyone has any theories as to what I could do differently to make the downloadable versions of the movie look nicer, please let me know. I don't know, maybe I'm just being fussy, pedantic, and unreasonable.

 

p.s. I hope this is in the right category; if it's not, I apologize profusely!

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Hi,

 

Well, it's a 29.97fps movie that's had 24p data rammed into it, so every fourth or fifth frame is duplicated. Very bad. It's difficult to interpret exactly how this has happened since I'm looking at a half-height movie which doesn't have any fields in it, but the solution will be somewhere in the project settings panels in Premiere. I can't really say more without knowing how your timeline is set up, but I should imagine that he's got it set up to unwind the 24pA correctly, but he's then exporting a 29.97 movie from what looks like a 24p timeline with the result that the basic export interpolator just throws in a load of dupe frames to make it work. I can't really tell you exactly how to fix this, since I don't usually have anything to do with 24p NTSC, but it may be as simple as changing the output frame rate to 24 (it's certainly 29.97 at the moment.)

 

Chase this up, but bear in mind that it will never look on a computer monitor the way it looks on an NTSC TV. On a computer monitor you're generally seeing a pretty good approximation of a true progressive display, so it won't have that judder in it that 3:2 pulldown gives you. It should look more like a projected film does.

 

Phil

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I would've thought Premiere supports the 24p output but maybe my darling editor (:rolleyes:) screwed up. Maybe what Mr. Rhodes said is correct and it doubled those frames. What a !@#$ pain! I have half a mind to hand the tape off to somebody else (like an editor who knows Avid Symphony!), give them a copy of what I've got as a rough guide, and let them start from scratch so that I don't risk having the final cut look like @$$. I am not sure how to handle this but I'm open to suggestions. I mean, it was just an experimental project for me but it ended up kinda growing on me and I want it to look as good as the original footage; there's no reason why it shouldn't. So I am a little frustrated.

 

By the way, it seems the moderator has moved this thread to a more appropriate category; thank you!

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Yes..... When you shoot in 24p, you should edit in 24p, and send out all your web movies in 24p. When you finally go to video, you'll want to add in the pull down to make it 29.97. Adding the interlacing is always the final step. When you go to DVD, if done correctly, it will actually flag the player that the source is 24p and the play will remove interlacing for still frames. nifty!

 

Unless the frames were added on the capture, you should be able to salvage your edit just fine - if it was captured at 29.97... that's going to be some eye matching.

Edited by Mark Douglas
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PPro 1.5 will remove the pull down no matter what kind of session you edit in. Even in 29.97 session it attempts to edit and play it as 24. If you use a 24p or 24pa session then burn a 24p DVD everything should be ok. PPro as far as I know can't really add back the pulldown on export without a bunch of errors. It's a bug in the software and I don't know if they fixed it yet. I believe most people are exporting to After Effects to add back the the cadence to 29.97. Because of this bug it's nearly impossible to edit a session with both 60i and pulled down 24p material in the same timeline. Mine does it fine until you render it then, the 24p gets really screwed up.

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Hi,

 

None of this should be an enormous problem for web export. Just set the output to 24fps and you're fine. What I normally do in situations where I have several deliverables - web, VHS, DVD, CD-ROM, whatever - is to export an uncompressed movie of the timeline and then make everythnig from that. If you have material you need in 60i, you can create that in a free tool such as VirtualDub from your 24p source.

 

You don't need Avid, there's no point in running to technology at this point. What you need is an editor who knows what he's doing...

 

Phil

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but it ended up kinda growing on me and I want it to look as good as the original footage;

It kinda grows on me, too. I like the way you use the edge of the mirror to control exactly how much of the guy you reveal. It beats the overscan/sloppy frame lines problem inherent in TV.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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Thank you John. It's interesting you say that because some people were unsure about that shot, but I kinda grew partial to it. Overall I'm pretty happy with the piece with the exception of this quality issue. I plan to eventually write a score for the piece myself as part of a class assignment, so that should be pretty cool.

 

Anyway, I think what I'll do is ask my editor if I can see the original Premiere file, and then I can kinda go through it with him and figure out how best to salvage this. He said yesterday that he was trying some different codecs when exporting and that it helped clean it up. But I don't know. It seems to me that you could try every single file format and codec in the book, but if your original file in the timeline is not what it should be, isn't it a moot point? And this is why I am not an editor! :blink:

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24P uses a standard 3:2 pulldown when recorded to 60i. 24PA uses a special pulldown that is more obvious visually because instead of having a video frame where one field was from one original progressive-scan capture and the second field is from the next progressive-scan capture, it repeats every fifth frame instead.

 

This looks juddery but it makes it easier to extract the pulldown when importing the footage into something like FCP so that you can work in true 24P with no pulldown. In other words, you are supposed to use 24PA with the idea to remove the pulldown immediately, not leave it in.

 

I don't see how an EDL will tell you that one way or another.

 

It's a pretty big decision whether to use 24P or 24PA in the camera, although normal pulldown can be removed as well in some editing software, just not as easily or quickly.

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