Going from 24pa DV source material to 25fps pal?

John C Lyons

John C Lyons

Veteran
Hello,

I am submitting a new feature film I edited in FCPX to a film festival that is VERY specific on their requirements for uploading the film for consideration (copy from their email below):

For the upload the file must comply with the following specifications:

VIDEO
Codec: avc1 H.264
Frame Size: 1280px X 720px
Bitrate: 821kbps
Frame Rate: 25

AUDIO
Codec: mp4a: MPEG-4 AAC LC
Bitrate: 128kbps
Channels: 2 (stereo)
Sample Rate: 48KHz

I shot the film on a Panasonic DVX100a. So my questions here is: how do I accurately go from 24pa DV material to pal?

I have exported as a single ProRes 444 QuickTime file (23.976 fps) and was expecting to just go into the latest Compressor, setup these requirements, convert, upload and be finished. Unfortunately, not that easy. And the festival is being very strict on their requirements. My biggest problem is going to 25 fps.

When I just do a custom export in Compressor and select 25 frames the result is a jittery video on playback.

Is there any way to smooth this out better using Final Cut Pro X and/or Compressor?

THANK YOU!
 
Usual practice is to speed up 24 fps about 4% to get to 25 fps.

It would actually be 4.271% for 23.976.

I suspect you can do this with your ProRes master file on a 25p timeline in FCPX.
 
If you have access to Cinema Tools you can just change the playback rate on your ProRes master to 25p.
 
thanks for the replies, everyone.

I haven't gotten back to my office yet today but I am a little concerned how this works with the audio. Will the audio still sync if I am speeding up the video 4.271%? in theory I don't know how it could.
 
It will speed up a tiny bit.

There really aren't any perfect solutions for converting 24p to 25p; you saw yourself that at real-time, it becomes jittery -- it has to, because you either have to interpolate every frame, or you double every 24th frame, producing a slight stutter once per second. 24 fps material is often sped up to be shown as 25 fps in order to keep the picture perfect.
 
The motion is a LOT better now after using the speed controls in Frame Controls (Compressor). Output settings said: Time remapping:output duration 95.903999%
The audio is synched well at the beginning of the exported file (it's 1 hr 43 min film runtime) but then as I get further along in the playback it gets more and more out of synch. I test played back the exported file in QuickTime.
Any ideas?
 
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