Export 24pA back to tape screwed up on Premiere?

[Huy Vu]

I almost never go 24p back to tape but yesterday I had to. Shot 2:3:3:2 24p SD on the A1, edited in Premiere, removed the pulldown, everything seemed good. Then when the footage starts writing to tape, it starts jumping all over the place, seemingly alternating between 16:9 and 4:3. The project was on Premiere 2.0. I put it into Premiere CS3 and gave that a shot. Same problem.

After an hour of research, I finally figured out the problem. Premiere doesn't automatically add back pulldown to make 60i. And there's no way to force it to do it. Finally had to render out uncompressed, import into a 30fps timeline and go out to tape that way, which went flawlessly. But of course this is no longer 24fps and there's no way to remove those extra frames.

Did Adobe screwed up here or what?

 

[Mike_Raddport]

I just did that exact thing yesterday. I have a 24PA squeeze mode project in PPRO 2.0 shot on DVX100A and exported to tape flawlwssly - of course it was squeezed on tape but played well using the export to tape function.

 

[Neil Rowe]

yeah, the DV 24p project automatically adds the cadance to 60i when you export to tape using the 24PA method,

but for other cameras, you can just render out a 24p file if you want pure 24p to archive, and put it on a backup DVD, HDD, or DLT or similar if you prefer tape, but otherwise , yeah, just render out a 30p project, and play that out to tape. or, without an extra render ....if you use realtime playback to your camera through firewire as selected in the projects properties, you can select your 24p conversion method there, and just hit record on the camera, and play back the work area. this will give you either a 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 cadance output to your tape. the only issue with doing it this way is that you will lose your timecode that would normally be kept by a tape export, but assuming you put the first frame of your output section of the project on the first frame of the timeline, everyone else can match points in time off of the timeline as long as they line it up on the first frame as well. just prerender the timeline before playback and it should be fine.

 

[Matt Grunau]

Out of curiosity, with DVD-r's as inexpensive as they are, why would you ever export to tape? In doing so, you are slamming your footage back into a 4.1.1. color depth, and going back to analog format.

If you were going DigiBeta or even BetaSP, it may make sense. There is no reason to ever go back to DV once you have captured and edited. If you have a company that demands that, simply put the DV files on DVDs or multiple DVDs using something as simple as Nero Backup.

Save yourself the headache of re-encoding to DV, possibly losing color space, and simply backup do DVDs.

I have had to do this for a client more than once. They wanted a MiniDV to capture from, but after all the work I had done, mograph and 4.4.4. graphics included, slamming into a DV format would simply not do my work justice. So, I gave them a project spanning multiple disks, and let them simply put it back together. Almost 15 gigs, and I am glad I took the route that did.

Your work is important. And, I realize that a client's requests are also important. But in most cases, the client has no idea of the technical side of things, and will simply do as they are told from their tech guys, who usually don't know as much as you do.

I can't think of a reason to back up to tape. You degrade your work, and you resort back to what is becoming an ever increasingly obsolete format.

MiniDV is great for capture, but once it is there, don't put it back.



M.

 

[Huy Vu]

It's actually not for delivery, but part of a workflow. I edited on a PC but for this particular project I had to bring the final video to a Mac. The final project file needed to be in FCP because I'm handing it off to someone else (long, complicated story). I first tried rendering out the file in .avi uncompressed, load it into a hard drive, but the Mac wouldn't recognize the file. In fact, it wouldn't even see the file.

First I thought it was a platform incompatibility thing because I know that FCP will refused outright to read files that were captured through Premiere (HDV mpeg for example). Last time this came up I had to render to tape and then capture through FCP to get the correct Quicktime wrapper. But this was also the first time I'm using 24p. It took over an hour and I couldn't get it to work at all and I'm pretty sure that for whatever reason, my copies of PP 2.0 and CS3 will not add pulldown for back to tape.

What should have taken half an hour took until six AM. And the sad part is? It was my hard drive that was malfunctioning so that the Mac wouldn't see the uncompressed .avi. Loaded it into another hard drive and got it to work. But the export to tape issue still bothers me.

The original footage was DV so color space doesn't really matter, I do suffer one generation of compression loss but it's acceptable if I can get FCP to run it quickly. Thankfully this isn't something I have to do often.