Shooting in Wrong Timebase

[Brandon S]

Hey guys, have a client who was using the Epic and was supposed to be shooting 29.97, the camera person didn't change the time base to 29.97 however (I believe it was still set to 23.98 so they wound up with Varispeed footage). Now when they place it in their 29.97 timeline it's not acting properly. Anyway to conform that back to a 29.97 timebase?

[Jason Diamond]

you need to add the pulldown. AVID will do it automatically or you can transcode the footage adding that in compressor or Adobe Media Encoder etc...

But it will still be creating frames regardless no matter what you do.

[Yannik Markworth]

But as the playback Framerate is Metadata, shouldn't there be a way to adjust this in RedcineX?

If you are in Adobe, it's a simple fix:
Right Click on the Clip >> Interpret Footage
Overwrite the Framerate with the one you shot at.

[jimhare]

The frame rate is not metadata, it's the ACTUAL framerate. Metadata suggests you can dial up any frame rate in post, which of course is not the case.

Since it's varispeed you will need to first speed it up so it runs in realtime at 23.98, then do a normal pulldown to make it 29.97

[Yannik Markworth]

Maybe I missunderstood.

There are two Frame Rates you can specify in Camera: Project Frame Rate (the Frame Rate you want the clips to be played back at) and the Frame Rate your camera records at.
For most Film-People (except Peter Jackson) the Project Frame Rate will be 24 (or 23.976...).
Then you go on and select 24 as your Framerate and record at that and you are done with it.

If you want to shoot slowmo stuff, you select a Framerate higher than the project Framerate. This will record (e.g.) 120 frames per second, which will be played back at whatever Project Frame Rate you selected, thus resulting in Slowmotion.

Now, if I understand the original Post correctly, the Project Frame Rate was set wrongly. This can easily happen in PAL-land.
Imagine you were on a film set and shot with your normal Project Frame Rate of 23.976 with 24 fps selected as your recording framerate.
You wrap and your next gig is shot for TV with 25 frames per second.
You set your recording frame rate to 25 frames per second but FORGET to change your project framerate, so it stays at 23.976, resulting in a veeeeery small slow-motion effect. this, of course, messes up audio synch etc...

Now - of course you can never change the actual frames per second, that were recorded during the shoot (the number on the top-left corner of your touchscreen).
But you SHOULD be able to change the framerate the clips are played back at (changing it to 25fps would result in the 25fps material being played back in real time without any pulldown or other interpolation).

Adobe lets you do this very easily (as described above). I have not found a way to do this in RedcineX, though.


Or maybe I am really not getting all of this, in which case I'd be very happy if you corrected me =)

All the best!

[MichaelP]

A frame is a frame is a frame - what you set the playback to will determine whether is slower or faster than what it was shot at. I can see this being a great feature even at the expense of losing single system sync audio in the process. I would just export BWF first if I needed the audio, then process the footage to the desired frame rate. MetaFuze can do this as well for proper speed playback when this occurs, but metadata is now off to original sources. Adobe does have that great feature of "interpret as" which is exactly what's needed in this situation.

Michael

[Mark Toia]

I did 24p instead of 25p one day.... Almost made me cry when we tried to convert it back.

Ya never do that twice..

[Nick Shaw]

If you are working in FCP, Cinema Tools can change the time base of a QuickTime so it plays back at 29.97 as shot, instead of 24 or whatever the project framerate was set to. One thing to beware of with this though is that the original timecode will be at the project frame rate, so matching back to the R3Ds is more complex if you need to do that.