combine 60i and 24p into a single project and retain motion cadence of both

CharlesPapert

CharlesPapert

Director of Photography
I directed a project recently that takes place in a newsroom. We used ped cameras that shot 60i for the live material, and REDs for the behind-the-scenes stuff. My goal was to find a way to retain the 60i look to contrast it with the 24p look in the edit. This piece will never go to broadcast, just Vimeo/Youtube, Quicktime on a laptop etc. as it is a presentation.

I've tested putting everything on a 60p timeline in Premiere and the results are fairly encouraging...the 24p footage gets a clean 3:2 pulldown and retains its cadence, but the 60i footage seems to get converted to 30p, where two consecutive fields are combined into a frame and then repeated. It seems that we need to convert the 60i footage to 60p elsewhere and then re-import into the timeline to be able to retain the appearance of 60 images per second. Does anyone have suggestions on how to do so?
 
I would use frame doubling while using motion-compensated deinterlacing of the 60i footage to get superior results.

I personally prefer to do this with Vapoursynth, there is also specialized hardware available that can do this.


Here is an example of an almost 50 year old NTSC recording deinterlaced with motion compensation and frame doubled and other processing:

 
Have you tried nesting the 60i material and putting it in the 24p timeline? I'm just guessing but it might do the trick.
 
Milan O. said:
Have you tried nesting the 60i material and putting it in the 24p timeline? I'm just guessing but it might do the trick.
Click to expand...

Yes--that converts it to something like 24p, losing the motion cadence of 60i. Which I don't want.

Cary, thank you for that info and the clip has apretty amazing look for its age. Vapoursynth looks a little heavy duty to tackle, I'm hoping for something a little simpler...!
 
I did this back in the day for my Joey and Jerome movies. I think it has to be the 60i timeline, and the 24p has to be shot in the mode where it's meant to be used on a 60i timeline. The DVX cams and the XL2 both had 2 different 24p modes. . .one was meant to be used in a 60i timeline, a 24p timeline, but could be converted to 60i if need be. Don't know if the modern cams have these options. Maybe something like the C100 does (PF24?), but people argued with me when I made the case for this particular application being the reason to use PF24 so maybe that's NOT why it exists?.
 
I remember those modes, Josh--my memory serves that it was essentially a 23.98 mode (for video application) and a 24p mode (for film-out).

Yes, I could easily do a 60i timeline and be done with it, but then I'd be interlacing the 24p material and that's not preferable as it is 90% of the piece. The 60p timeline seems like a much better solution, if I can work out how to achieve the 60i to 60p conversion without a ton of fuss.
 
I don't have access to the footage at the moment, it's at my editors--it's been suggested that the deinterlace function in Resolve 12.5 can do the trick. Can anyone confirm or deny?
 
I don't know if this will be of any help but hopefully it will. I shot two short clips with my Varicam LT and moved it around a bit. One 23.97p 1920x1080 and one in 59.94i 1920x1080. I tried putting the interlaced clip into Resolve but for some reason the "box" for deinterlacing the clip can't be chosen. Another thing is that both Resolve and Premiere interpret the 59.94 file as a 29.97. Maybe it always looks this way, I don't know. I mostly shoot in 25p. Anyway I tried this in Premiere and I have uploaded the different results:

I put the interlaced file on the timeline and then changed the sequence to "custom" and chose 59.94 which made the clip look like I think it should, so even though it says the clip is 29.97 it looks like 59.94:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9wknez57zvazfmr/Sequence 02 interlaced.mpeg?dl=0

I also tried to right click on the file and chose "Field options" and then "Always deinterlace" and this is the result:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7cuz64gpgwgq2cy/Sequence 02 deinterlaced.mpeg?dl=0

I then created a new timeline with the 23.97 file and changed it to 59.94 and then put the 59.94 interlaced sequence (same effect as nested) on the timeline. (I guess it would have the same effect if I put the "29.97" file on the same timeline directly.) This is the result:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0tgu3h31szof4gf/Sequence 01 interlaced.mpeg?dl=0

I did the same thing but deinterlaced the file in the nested 59.94 sequence. This is the result:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vz6fzaoe76isjzv/Sequence 01 deinterlaced.mpeg?dl=0

They're all exported with "Match Sequence Settings".
 
CharlesPapert said:
I directed a project recently that takes place in a newsroom. We used ped cameras that shot 60i for the live material, and REDs for the behind-the-scenes stuff. My goal was to find a way to retain the 60i look to contrast it with the 24p look in the edit. This piece will never go to broadcast, just Vimeo/Youtube, Quicktime on a laptop etc. as it is a presentation.

I've tested putting everything on a 60p timeline in Premiere and the results are fairly encouraging...the 24p footage gets a clean 3:2 pulldown and retains its cadence, but the 60i footage seems to get converted to 30p, where two consecutive fields are combined into a frame and then repeated. It seems that we need to convert the 60i footage to 60p elsewhere and then re-import into the timeline to be able to retain the appearance of 60 images per second. Does anyone have suggestions on how to do so?
Click to expand...

So you're saying Premiere seems to convert it to 30p on a 60p timeline?

Is Frame Blending on or off (the checkmark)? If it's on, try turning it off.
 
Do you want to de-interlace.. surely part of the (horrid) look is the horizontal stripes of interlaced hell?


in the interlaced sections..

Stepping through you want frame one to be 50% black

black
image
black
image

and frame two to be 50% black..

image
black
image
black

Or even with suitably bad upscaling to represent 576i..

black
black
image
image
black
black

Or to represent a phosphur panel glow..

Image one 50% opacity
Image one 50% opacity
Image two 100%
Image two 100%

Image two 100%
Image two 100%
Image three 50%
Image three 50%


QT7 is always worth a play. And davinci.

there may also be some filters, often known as 'bad tv' ?

S
 
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if *I* recall correctly the 24p modes that I'm thinking of on those cams did some kind of pulldown to spread the 24 frames correctly over 30 frames...no visible de-interlacing involved. Similar to how all films for view on tv at 60i were done. It should maintain the exact same 24p look. Maybe just try a test? shoot a little 60i, if your cam has the correct mode for 24p on a 60i timeline, shoot some 24p with that, mix em on a 60i timeline and see what happens.
 
Thanks all for suggestions.

Really what I was pushing to do was keep the motion cadence of 60i and not compromise the cadence of the 24p footage--so using a 60i timeline wasn't ideal as it would interlace the the 24p stuff (Josh), and I feel the degraded approach with the 60i footage, adding fake scan lines etc (Sam) is a kind of retro idea that should have gone out with SD.

I used JES Deinterlacer, which I'd downloaded years before for something else. Under the deinterlace tab there was an option to select either field or both. I selected both. 60i footage successfully (and quickly) converted to 60p. Pretty nice job too, I didn't see any artifacting in the motion.

Then it was as simple as placing the footage along with the 24p material onto a 60p (59.94) timeline. Both Youtube and Vimeo displayed it as a 1080 60 file and the motion cadence of both was properly retained.
 
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