Avid converting 720/60/30 then 30pn

[Jim Anderson]

Jim Anderson
Member

Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: NYC area

HDX900 and HVX200 in 720/30p Help
We did our first shoot with an HVX-200 onto P2 cards and an HDX-900 in 720/30p (onto a firestore). Now that I'm trying to bring the footage into Avid I've realized that the HVX200 was actually shooting 720/30pN to save card space, while the HDX900 was shooting 720/30p. Avid will only work with 720/30p in a 720/59.94 project and 720/30pN in a 720/29.97 or 1080/59.94 project (the two format framerates cannot be mixed in the same timeline). So, my question is: do you know of a way to convert the 720/30p footage (which avid reads as 59.94 frame rate) to actual 29.97 frames without losing resolution?


Luckily we also shot the HDX footage to DVCPRO-HD tape so if we can't work with the 720/30p Firestore MXF/P2 footage we could capture the tapes-- if we do this does it make sense to work in a 1080i/59.94 project?

Is there any way to do a pull-down of the HDX-900 footage which, even though was set to record 720/30p, actually recorded all duplicate frames which shows up under the properties of 720/60p? We need to convert the HDX-900 footage to 720/30pn to cut with the HVX-200 footage. We have learned that when shooting with both these cameras to avoid the native format in the HVX-200 but still have to deal with footage from 2 shoot days. I have Cineform Prospect HD and AE CS3 for conversion. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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Jim A

 

[Jason Adams]

I believe that Raylight's MXFX can do the conversion. They have a demo that you can try. The software is a bit expensive at 200 bucks but there is not another tool I know of for converting frame rates for Avid.

http://dvfilm.com/MXFX/index.htm

 

[Take_1]

Seeing that you have the tapes ... if you have no other option and are willing to loose your TC info ... you could try to digitize it into the other project rate. If you do this though you may want to make a backup drive (or two) of the digitized media so that if you ever did have to go back to the footage you could always restore it seeing as the TC on the tapes will no longer be valid for this edit.

 

[Jim Anderson]

Thanks for the advice. It seems worthwhile to purchase http://dvfilm.com/MXFX/index.htm for a number of reasons including some future graphic elements we came across will need conversions done as well to fit the Avid project parameters.

 

[xmephestox]

beware of MXFX for p2, it works great unless you have a great deal of spanned clips. then it will glitch out on you on avid. they still have no update or solution for it yet. i shot 24 cards worth of footage all at 8 gb, and 16 gb sizes at 1080/24pa and on the ingestion of the 4th card clips started stealing each other's identities beecause of the spanned clip glitch. only workaround for that is to mixdown your footage 1 card at a time and work off the mixdowns.

 

[Jim Anderson]

Thanks. The post house we are working with suggested using our DVCPRO-HD tape backups and feeding into avid via a 1200 vtr set to 720/30p output from the 6 pin FW port to match the 720/30pn footage. The DVFILM will serve as a backup conversion option.