FCP issues with 24pA footage
 

I've tried searching for an answer to my question both here and other websites and I can't seem to find anything addressing my specific problem.

I have shot a great deal of footage in 24pA on a DVX-100a and I am capturing it into Final Cut 6 with advanced pulldown. Final Cut is repeatedly, albeit not always, confusing the footage as 29.97 fps therefore making the footage look awful and the audio being way off.

I read that when capturing, if FCP notices time code breaks it will default into capturing as 29.97 and mess up the capture. I've tried capturing in small pieces to avoid this but it won't make a difference.

The strange part is, the footage is 23.98 if I open it in Quicktime or Cinema Tools, but if I import into FCP it's reading it as 29.97 again regardless.

While I'm at it, final cut seems to be really finicky with the captures. I manually set the time code in the camera at the beginning of each tape, and there are no time code breaks in the tape, but final cut will experience them regardless.

Does anyone have suggestions or know what is going wrong? Any workarounds? Like I said it isn't happening all the time, I'd say 80% of the tapes are coming out fine. It's extremely frustrating. Thanks in advance.

What are your capture-settings for the project? Do they match the frame-rate/aspect you shot in?

Check out the posts from Barry Green; he is the 24PA master for both DVX100/HVX200.

Try capturing in smaller chunks as well.

Noah

FCP 24PA capture is buggy. used to work perfect. best thing is to load as 29.97 then use cinema tools to strip out the extra frames. ugly workaround, but it will get the job done. it will not recompress the frames when doing this, it will copy the original bits so its a lossless process