HD100 footage in After Effects
 

Greetings all, thanks for all the good advice on my last post. I recently shot some footage on the HD100. I captured the footage using Sony Vegas 7 as M2t files. When I imported a clip into After Effects under a 720p 23.98 comp, I find that it is interpreting the footage as 30fps. I loaded various other 24p HD100 M2t's to find the same result (30fps). Is this normal behavior or is it a glitch in my program? Thanks in advance for the replies.

Steven,

I assume your are using AE7 or newer since AE6.xx cant import m2ts. I use AE6.5 in my work but only after converting the transport streams to an intermediate, in my case canopus HQ avi's.
I checked the time base on the AE7 when importing m2t from the HD100 shot at 24P and while its reflected as 59.94 its actually running normally on the timeline. conforming it to 23.976 will slow down the footage similar in effect to conforming overcranked 60fps footage. I believe its the AE program that has this glitch. Try to convert your m2ts to an intermediate to have an accurate readout in the timebase as this will also give you a faster performance in AE work as compared to using the transport streams.

By the way, here in the island where i live there are a lot of people i know with your family name. You dont happen to have roots here do you?

Ted Ramasola

Bohol Island
The Philippines

Hello Ted, what a quick response! I get what you're saying and it's nice to see that I'm not the only one who noticed this. IT IS After Effects 7 Pro. I also noticed that when exporting it also exported the project as 30fps. I guess I will have to try a different file type. While I have your ear, I also notice that when I export 1280 x 720 footage as Widescreen 720 x 480, the footage looks stretched in 4:3 on playback. What settings should I use to get a720p downconvert to SD. Thanks again

P.S. My name is Peruvian. I don't have any Philippino relatives that I know of, lol.

Steven, use MPEG Streamclip to convert the footage to Uncompressed or any other convenient codec in QuickTime and be sure to specify frame rate of 23.976 and MPSC will remove the duplicated frames from the stream and give you the final clip at the right frame rate. You'll find that AE will work much better with a format that doesn't use temporal compression.

Hey Mr. Ciccone, so nice of you to join this discussion. I am currently using your True Vector v3 settings. Thanks for that, and your tutorial on Backfocus Adjustment was very helpful! Anyway, as for your advice. I always enjoy checking out new software. I have never used this Mpeg Streamclip. I downloaded it and installed it but I am having problems loading my M2T clips into it. It says bad file size or the file is incomplete. Is using MPSC better than converting in a NLE system? Wouldn't uncompressed 720p Quicktimes be huge files? Did you read my question on how to export a proper looking downconverted 720p file? The files I downconvert from 720p in AE come out stretched in 4:3 even though I am specifying an NTSC Widescreen preset. Do you know why this is happening? Thanks in advance

The scaling/strtchinbg can be caused by the wrong selection of target size, I captured the screen for the settings to export HD100 clips to QuickTime. I use SheeVideo as a codec, which is less than half the size of uncompressed. It's true that uncompressed is huge, I suggested it only as a way of storing HD clips while preserving full color data. You can use others as based on your preference.
Here is the screengrab: http://paolociccone.com/images/mpsc/MPSC02.jpg
Also MPSC can fix timecode breaks.
Regarding if MPSC is better than the NLE, I don't know. Different NLEs handle things differently. Final Cut simply cannot handle m2t files, Premiere, what I'm using now, handles m2t files just fine so I can convert from Premiere to anything else via the Adobe Encoder. MPSC is a specialized application that proved over the past couple of years, to be able to handle many MPEG files and it can be used for batch conversion so it's quite useful for me.

Thank you Mr. Ciccone, I tried the MPEG Streamclip. Version 1.81 had the Mpeg plugins all the later builds did not for some reason. I converted to Quicktime component video (my quicktime alternative did not have the Sheer plugin) and once plugged in to AE it finally read proper framerate, Thanks.

Glad it worked.