I'm starting work on a new short film shot with an HVX200 capturing DVCPro HD to P2 cards. The director brought me the footage on a G-RAID 2 drive. The contents of the drive are the dumps from the cards, meaning a bunch of "P2 folders" for lack of a better term (this is my first time working with P2 footage, so I am not up on everything including terminology).

In order to begin my assembly cut, I began by bringing the footage into Final Cut Pro (v5.1.4) by way of the handy Import Panasonic P2 tool. It has been going pretty smoothly, with a few exceptions. Some clips, which play back fine when previewing them in the Import tool, end up with frame rate issues after the import. One clip ends up with at 3fps, another at 2 fps, one at 19.98 fps…

Everything was shot at 720p24N, meaning the clips should be 23.98 fps. I tried importing again; same thing. Trashed the FCP prefs; same thing. New FCP project file; same thing. I tried a searching in the post forums for P2 frame rate issues, however nothing came up… am I really the first person to experience this? No, I can't be… can I?

That's really strange. I don't remember if 5.1.4 had the "log & transfer" ingest option but if not, try using P2Log Pro instead. Is it possible those segments were shot VFR (over/under-crank)?

It turns out that it was the automatic pulldown removal option was enabled. Since the footage was 24pN, it should have been disabled. After making sure of this, i was able to reimport the clips in FCP and things were fine.

Odd that this only occurred with 15 of the 261 clips. It's those damn gremlins in the machine, i tell ya!