Help, i'm officially baffled! NeoScene / PProCS3 framerate question
 

Hi all,

Ok, i've been trying to suss this out as best I can on my own, but now i've reached a point where i'm just gonna have to ask the pros! My knowledge of conversions/framerates/codecs/settings/etc is admittedly basic!


I have my 5dmk2 footage, converted with neoscene...I watch it back as the raw avi and it looks fine.
A panning/movement shot is absolutely fine (at 29.97fps)

But converting out of PPro as a raw HD clip, at 25fps, is choppy/stuttery.


SO, am i meant to make a raw HD clip at the same framerate? but what if it integrates 25fps footage from my XH-A1s? what about SD AVI's (for DVDs - UK Pal, Widescreen)??


i suppose my main question is, can i or should i turn the 5dmk2 clips into 25fps clips???


AAAAH! why can't the 5dmk2 just let me change the framerate?! - i ask for too much, i should just accept it's a bl##dy nice camera! :)

cheers

p.s. if this helps, my PProCS3 project is 1080i25 (50i).

Anyone? pwetty please?!

Can somebody maybe at least help to point me in a direction, so i can investigate further?


So, anyone with PPro, mixing 5dmk2 footage with 25fps footage, how are you doing it??


many thanks

Yes!

As a CS3 user, I recommend using After Effects for the conversion. There are lots of ways to approach it with AE, and there are some good tutorials out there.

Frame Rate Conversion : Adobe After Effects basics Tutorial

You might do a search on Twixtor in After Effects for frame conversion. It's made for creating in-between frames: Canon 5D Mark II Test 3 (PFTrack and Twixtor) on Vimeo

Twixtor has a demo version, so you can decide for yourself via hands-on experimentation, whether you need its extra capabilities:

RE:Vision Effects, Inc. : Products: Twixtor

(and extra cost).

Vegas Pro 9 will also interpolate 30p down to 25p, with reasonable success. The term "success" may be in the eye of the beholder, since interpolating 30p --> 24p or 25p is probably one of the most difficult video algorithms to perfect. The presence of interpolation artifacts will always be an issue with some people and not with others.

I edited and produced the DVDs and Blu-ray Disc for IEC's international power measurement standard for TVs. I had source material in 59.94i, 50i, 29.97p, and 23.976p. As I recall there were 200+ clips, some of which were wildly different than others. The end product was delivered in 50i and 59.94i, 480 and 1080.

I ended up using a combination of frame drop/repeats and frame blending, depending on the motion. I made a custom decision for each clip. I don't think I ended up using motion interpolation, as the final product needed images that looked "normal." The motion stuff I tried would invariably screw up some edges here and there. As an international standard, I was more interested in getting it technically correct than artistically correct. It was really all about the picture levels in each scene, so the less processing, the better.

BTW, I used Vegas for editing and After Effects for the conversions. After Effects gave me explicit control over the parameters (once I learned how to use it.) Vegas can do blends and drops/repeats, but it makes some assumptions for you. That's fine for most applications, but not for one that needs technical certainty.

BTW, step 1 was to decompress at the native resolution. All my work was then in the uncompressed domain, until the final encode.

It was a ton of work, but so far... no user complaints. :)

ok, brilliant, many thanks...

it's a shame there's a few processes involved (5dmk2 > Neoscene > AE > PPro), but it was never gonna be straight-forward right?! :)

for anyone interested:

i was getting frustrated reading all the multi-step processes from turning 30fps to 25fps (and prevent stuttering in moving/panning shots). so i came up with this, which totally suits me....

METHOD:
- put the raw 5dmk2 files into PPro (no need for Neoscene)
- right-click on the clip, press 'interpret footage' - change from 29.97fps to 25fps.
- drag on to timeline and mute/remove audio - see optional (2).
- done! (ready for Vimeo, or DV PAL DVD)


OPTIONAL (1): If the blacks look crushed, then just boost the levels/gamma by a small fraction...ok, this isn't technically the best way, but i found it to be fine.
OPTIONAL (2): changing the fps in this way slows the footage down a fraction (unnoticeable though). the audio slows too, so either delete the audio, or timestretch the footage back to the right time (i.e. speed up the clip by 120%).


this is ideal coz for what i want it for, i don't need the audio!!!

Another major benefit of this method, is you aren't left with huge .avi files from neoscene....