HV20 24p and Final Cut Express (FCE)
 

It's been awhile;

So, recently we picked up an HV20 and liked it so much we're picking up a second. We're shooting 24p using the setup recommended by Stu and we like what we see.

However, we're still editing in FCE and that won't change anytime soon (unless you all pick up a copy of "Breakdown", hint hint : ) so we're trying to find the best way to go about editing this footage.

My current plan is to pull the footage into a 1080i project, do the edit, output 1080i and then apply pulldown conversion to the resulting quicktime file. I don't know if this will work as expected, and I'm looking for suggestions for (reasonably inexpensive) software to perform this conversion.

Plan B would be to do the initial edit in FCE, then when the cut is complete, book some time on a FCP station and attempt to import the FCE project, footage, etc. Again, not sure if this is even possible, but I'm brainstorming.

Plan C is whatever superior workflow you can come up with that hasn't occurred to me yet.

Plan Z is to just shoot the footage and book A LOT of time on someone else's FCP station. This is plan Z because if it comes to this it might be cheaper to buy our own.

Looking forward to hearing from you guys again,

I am not sure it's possible to first edit, save to something else, and then remove pulldown. All the right progressive/interlaced frames will be saved differently and then none of the known methods of removing pulldown will work. You will end up with a real 1080i image instead of 24-in-60i.

Unfortunately, I think that the only way to do this right, is to remove pulldown first, and then edit in FCP in real 24p.

There's a chance that the new FCE will support 24P clips with it's new "open timeline."

If it doesn't, I think that you're still on the right track with editing it as 60i and removing the pulldown after the fact. For basic cuts this is almost guaranteed t work well. The only place this might breakdown is with transitions and titling, etc., any time new frames need rendered mixing two clips could be trouble since the HV20's cadence doesn't start consistently form clip to clip.

You should be able to do some simple, short tests to verify this, and then run!

The new FCE does not support 1080/24p, I called Apple about it yesterday and the guy confirmed to me that nothing has changed about this.

Probably right ... but it wouldn't be the first time an underpaid, uneducated CSR didn't know what he was talking about. ;-)

He specifically looked it up for me, I was insisted.

This isn't entirely correct. JES deinterlacer will scan the entire project and detect cadence breaks. (As long as you turn on that option.) It will take forever for a long project, but it WILL work. (I did it with a nearly 30 minute edit.) The only places it might not be able to properly decode and where you may end-up with artifacts are transitions where two interfering patterns combine, or titles or other generated frames, where you might end-up with interlaced material that has no cadence to detect. But with careful planning, I think that even these "worst-case" scenarios can be avoided or minimized.

Thanks for the info guys.

I did a quick test of the workflow on a single clip (no cross-fades or anything tricky) and JES was able to remove pulldown from the output file correctly.

I do have my doubts about what might happen if the footage was altered during the edit, especially if two clips were merged in some way, but I'm going to do a few more tests and if we can work around those situations, this might do the trick, at least for our current project.

Jason,
That's cool, but also to be expected.

- Can you test what happens with two clips, and a dissolve between them?
- Can you try dropping a 24P file onto a timeline and see what happens?

Thanks!

Will do, I might get some time this weekend to experiment, I'll see what I can get done.

I have done just what you suggest on the PC side in Vegas and then subesequently converted in Cineform. Suprisingly, it seemed to work without a hitch, despite me having had similar misgivings.