Drop Frame result adding to film like quality
 

Folks

I was doing an unattended autocapture using the Matrox RT2500 card and Premiere 6.01. I shoot entirely in FRAME mode for everything (Sports, Wedding, school plays, etc.) on my Canon XL1 (NTSC version).

I did not noticed that I had some drop frame
during the capture of the video into my computer.

Later when I was editing some footage, I noticed what appears to be dark specs (very little, mind you) that would appear randomnly across the image almost like those dusts you see when projecting film. I took a closer look at the image, frame by frame in Premiere and it is actually "lost" pixels due to the dropped frame. Now coupled that with FRAME mode it's starting to look more like film!!! Have I stumbled onto something??

If you think dirt on the negative looks like film you are probably on to something. Personaly I hate dirt on my negative and refuse to pay my lab bill in full if it happens :)

Agree

But once the film (celluloid) leaves for
distribution to the various film theatres, the
film is at the mercy of the projectionist and the
state of the projection system. Dust and scratches will eventually make its way onto film
as the film is repeatedly shown.

I'm not advocating that one should introduce
artifacts (the missing pixels) for DV nor put scratches on the original film negative (celluloid).

But it's funny that people would degrade the
"video" look so that it becomes more "film"
look.

Speaking of artifacts, I was watching the latest
Star War movie and during several scenes where
dark areas are dominant, I noticed some dancing
"blocks". At first I thought they were shadows
cast by the actors or something. But I kept staring into these areas and it became apparent
that these are digital artifacts (large square blocks moving around). I asked several of my friends whether they noticed this and they said no. Any body noticed this?

"But once the film (celluloid) leaves for
distribution to the various film theatres, the
film is at the mercy of the projectionist and the
state of the projection system. Dust and scratches will eventually make its way onto film
as the film is repeatedly shown."

Oops. Let's hope Joe Redifier is not reading this post ;) I happen to agree with you on this.

"But it's funny that people would degrade the
"video" look so that it becomes more "film"
look."

I think more and more people are coming out of that and giving digital cinematography more credit.

Yes I saw the blocks. The film is posted in 7:1 compression (more compression than miniDV) so that is bound to happen. It probably doesn't show as much in digital projection. Hell Lucas for diving into DV production with the responsibility of a $100 000 000 budget. That takes some guts to do. Theres no risk in making Dogma movies compared to that.

As far as I know you cannot get black or weird pixels due to
dropped frames... why? Because the whole frame or sequence
of frames is dropped. Not pixels. Now you can have dropouts. But
these would results in 8x8 pixel blocks that are "off"....

I think either something is pretty wrong with your camera, or you
haven't used the best settings (like gain on +12 db)....

I re-captured the sequences that were causing
the dropped pixels. This time, no more dropped frame and no more lost pixels ... Go figure ...

On another note, how many of you out there go watch a film in the theatres not for the story itself, but for the cinematography? Half the time I don't even know what the story is.

On a related note, I have notice that premiere is pretty dodgy as far as capturing goes and was wondering if anyone has had similar problems. I was doing some AV->DV conversion of some videos I have and I tried several capture programs and none of them dropped frames except Premiere - even windows movie maker was more reliable. Because of this I don't use premiere for capturing anymore, but I'm interested to know if this is a premiere problem or if I just had bad luck with it.

Cheers
Aaron

Actually, the tool that I'm using to capture is Matrox's Media Tool Version 3.1b through the RT2500 card. I've never used Premiere's native capture feature.

My system is a Pentium III 1 GHZ with 512 MB RAM with 10 (yes 10) 120 Gig Western Digitals 8 Meg Cache HDs (formatted in NTFS) all running at ATA100 mode and dedicated to video/sound. With this setup, I still get dropped frame. Nothing else is running on this baby. (OS=Windows 2000 Pro).

I'm doing a 14 hour documentary shoot this weekend using the Canon XL-1 (FRAME mode and 16:9, naturally) on the Dragon Boat race here in Montreal. This stuff chews up disk space like candy!!! (1 hr = 13 Gig).

Aaron... what version of Premiere are you using? I'm using
Premiere 6.0 and I haven't got any problems at all! It captures
perfect. Sometimes I even record straight over my 100 mbit
network to my server and not even that drops frames.....
Go figure :)

Rob, I use v6.0 also. Wierd huh. I don't lose many frames, but usualy between 3 and 10 for say a 10 minute capture. My machine's pretty beasty too. ~1.5 ghz, ata100 1/2 gig RAM all that jazz.

It's ok though I don't mind using something else. Maybe when I start doing big things with it I will though :)

One of the reasons I wanted to see Minority report was because of the cinematography. That movie was simply beautiful.