Canon 5D MKII 30p to 24p FCS Conversion

[Dan Brockett]

Hi all:

In regards to the Philip Bloom/Denver Riddle "Perfect 30p to 24p Workflow"post that was very popular before the 24p firmware for the 5D MKII came out, I am trying to figure out something and was hoping that someone reading this could help me to understand. I still have a ton of 30p 5D MKII footage that I shot last year and am working on converting some of it to 24p (23.98 fps).

This question will sound naive but what exactly is gained by going through the Cinema Tools "Conform" step vs. just bringing a 30P clip into Compressor and rendering it out to 24p (23.98)? Is it just the timing aspect of bringing the 6 fps overcranked clip back to normal playback speed? The Apple Optical Flow technology is contained in the Compressor step, is it not? Isn't the Conform step in Cinema Tools merely changing the meta data in the file? I am trying to understand the logic in putting the file through Cinema Tools first, then re-timing it through Compressor.

I am definitely not a VFX artist, I am much more involved in production as a DP and as a Producer so these finer points of your workflow are just foreign to me. Thanks for any input you can give me. Do you use Cinema Tools in any other ways in your 5D MKII digital work flow besides the aforementioned 30p to 24p method? Any insight into this is appreciated.

Dan Brockett

[Dan Brockett]

I have posted this inquiry here as well as on five other industry boards without a single response. I have e-mailed Denver Riddle, the guy who came up with this DSLR workflow using Cinema Tools as well as Philip Bloom, who produced the demo video for using this method, no response from either of them. I have asked four prominent industry popular DPs and editors without a single one of them knowing anything about Cinema Tools.

This leads me to the belief that almost nobody in our industry knows anything about Cinema Tools. I will have to embark on performing my own tests. Will report back what I discover.

Dan

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Dan Brockett

This question will sound naive but what exactly is gained by going through the Cinema Tools "Conform" step vs. just bringing a 30P clip into Compressor and rendering it out to 24p (23.98)?

Dan, my understanding from the descriptions of this workflow is the belief that if you just use Compressor to convert 30fps to 24fps that it will throw away 6 fps & interpolate what remains. So the theory goes that if you use Cinema Tools to flip the bits in the header to slow down the footage first that it will have more frames to work on when doing the conversion. I am not sure that I buy this theory as this isn't film & there are no real frames anyway but the whole process does work but is by no means perfect.

Of course as I am sure you know if synchronising audio isn't an issue & you can live with a 6fps overcrank (cool slight slo-mo look) then just using Cinema Tools to conform the footage to 24fps is by far the easiest & quickest solution.