Major Import Problem with 1080i60!!! Need urgent help!

Joe Walker

Joe Walker

Well-known member
Hey all,

I shot a commercial at 1080i60 @ 24p. Everything went fine, I imported it all into a Quad g5 Mac on FCP 6, import went smooth, everything looked good, and then I noticed, the footage in the bin was showing the compressor as 1080i 60 @ 30P!!! WTF?! Its like the footage is trying to do "both" framerates when I drop it on the timeline. With all kinds of interpolation artifacts. When I look at the footage in the viewer it seems fine, the minute it hits the timeline its all screwed up. Why is it now saying the footage is 1080i @ 30p? I can verify I shot at 24p. How is this possible? How can I fix this?!!! I checked everything while shooting, the camera read out 1080i60 @ 24p and all, and then after import it suddenly says 30P. What do I do?
 
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Did you shoot 108024p or 24pA? Both of these are actually 29.97 just with a pulldown. If you do 24pA, FCP is smart enough to remove the pulldown for you upon p2 log and transfer.

Log and Transfer will tell you the exact format you shot, work from there. If its 24p footage then you have to use a software conversion to get it to 24p on your own..
 
No, I shot 24p (not 24pa). When I did log and transfer, it said everything was 1080i60 @ 24p. Once in the bin, it was showing as 108030p as in 30p progressive. But its like a hybrid of both. So tomorrow, I'm going to reshoot the whole thing.
 
You have to do a pulldown, by checking the remove extra frame box, dont know about the FCP 6.. But the concept is the same....Read what you are saying. you shot in 1080"i" at 24p.. The "I" is interlaced, which means that it will be on a 59.97 timeline, when you do a pulldown, and set the sequence for 24 fps, it will be fine. You dont have to shoot it again.
 
Gaburbano said:
You have to do a pulldown, by checking the remove extra frame box, dont know about the FCP 6.. But the concept is the same....Read what you are saying. you shot in 1080"i" at 24p.. The "I" is interlaced, which means that it will be on a 59.97 timeline, when you do a pulldown, and set the sequence for 24 fps, it will be fine. You dont have to shoot it again.
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Right...I did set the timeline for 59.94, but the footage in the bin is showing as 1080 30p, not 1080i @ 24p. Every other time I've done this there's never been a problem. I'm guessing it was a bad import. When I get to work I'll post stills so you all can see what the problem is.
 
Here you go, remember I shot 1080i60 @ 24p, and after importing into FCP 6.0.3 it shows up in the bin looking like this:
l_8bd23c312f146e183933a9f777cf1928.png


And if you look at the general info on the clip, you'll see it shows it as a 1080i60 clip:
l_b15a710ae86b10b8ad52c40db18530e6.png


So whadya think?
 
It could be your capture preset too. I'm not sure how it is on log and transfer, but when it was just log and capture, your capture preset determines how your footage is captured. This is why solid state recording still has a downfall. If this was tape, you can always just go back to your tape and recapture and change your preset. I bet you already formatted your P2 cards and lost all of the footage.

If I were you I would shoot one shot for a test and log and transfer using different capture preset to see if your footage will be changed to that.

Hope this helps.


Kak Lee
www.myspace.com/kaklee
 
The problem is that FCP has no capture preset for 1080/24p. This is a lesson I learned the hard way. If you want 24fps and intend to ingest into FCP, you need to shoot in 1080/24pA. Period.
 
I guess if you're going to shoot 1080/24p you might as well shoot 1080/24pA. I wonder if the 24pA capture preset will do the pulldown of the 24p?

I guess a couple question I have for Cannes1979 is, Why not shoot 720/24p(N)? Is the commercial intended to be delivered in 1080 for HD distribution or will it eventually be delivered in SD? If it will eventually be delivered in SD, you might as well shoot in 720. I believe you still get the same 422 color spacing with 720.

Kak Lee
www.myspace.com/kaklee
 
kakfilm said:
I guess if you're going to shoot 1080/24p you might as well shoot 1080/24pA. I wonder if the 24pA capture preset will do the pulldown of the 24p?
Click to expand...

Using the 24pA capture preset in FCP with 24p footage ** will not** fix the problem.
 
kakfilm said:
I guess if you're going to shoot 1080/24p you might as well shoot 1080/24pA. I wonder if the 24pA capture preset will do the pulldown of the 24p?

I guess a couple question I have for Cannes1979 is, Why not shoot 720/24p(N)? Is the commercial intended to be delivered in 1080 for HD distribution or will it eventually be delivered in SD? If it will eventually be delivered in SD, you might as well shoot in 720. I believe you still get the same 422 color spacing with 720.

Kak Lee
www.myspace.com/kaklee
Click to expand...

Kakfilm,

Yes I intend to deliver as an SD digibeta. And you're right, I could just shoot 720. I've done that before. I've just usually found that 1080 seems to make for a "slightly" higher rez downconvert. And I've shot 1080i60 @ 24p and done all of this before, its just that this is the first time I've ever seen FCP ingest P2 footage as a completely different frame rate from what I shot. I've read around, and occasionally this has happened to others as well. So for now, I've scheduled the re-shoot for later today, I'll be using 720p 24pN, and this time I'll check back the footage in FCP BEFORE I format the cards. Geez...well, tape has drop-outs and I could sit here and tell you the story about how back in 2003, I once shot a spot on super 16mm, and one whole roll was mag-scratched!:violent5:
 
I hear ya on the tape drop out. That's one thing nobody will miss with tape. I guess every option we have will always have a down fall. I have to reshoot a whole scene for one of my film because somehow the film didn't get exposed. Maybe some day someone will make a perfect solution for us.

Good luck with your reshoot and yeah keep us posted.

Kak Lee
www.myspace.com/kaklee
 
Have you tried to correct and review the problem in cinema tools? That's a powerful program and has helped me a bunch. Maybe try that as well.
 
Hi,

By setting the camera to 24P at 1080i you have effectively recorded 30 frames with a standard 2:3 pulldown. If you want to get to just the 24 frames you can do that but it will be a 2 step process. (might have been better to shoot in 24PA, but theat is for next time) Use Cinema Tools to render out the 24 frames.

The setup in FCP should be for 1080 at 29.97. Then bring the footage into Cinema Tools and then bring them into a timeline.

I trust you still have your original files on the HDD?

Hope this helps,

Jan
 
Update for you all...

I did the re-shoot at 720p 24pN and everything imported fine, no problems.

To Justyn, yes I tried cinema tools but the one thing I think I'm not communicating to everyone properly is that, normally when one shoots 1080i60 @ 24p and you import the footage in through FCP6 it shows up in the bin as 1080i60 (29.97)...like it should. The problem I had is that it showed up in the bin right after import as 1080 30p (as in 30 progressive), not as 1080i60 AND it behaved very finicky like. I tried changing the sequence to a 1080 30p sequence and it still displayed all sorts of jagged lines and stuff. In fact I tried a lot of different sequence settings to see what would work, and nothing worked.

To Jan, what you told me was helpful, however I didn't need pulldown removed for what I was shooting. Also, if you look at the pic I posted you'll see that in the bin the clip is displayed as 1080 30p and not 1080i60 (29.97) like it normally would. But when you look at the clip info, aka pic 2, you'll see it's displaying it as a 1080i60 clip, even though at the same time FCP is showing it as a 1080 30p clip, which is not what I shot. I tried shooting another few clips at 1080i60 @ 24p and imported them in and voila, no problems.....so this leads me to believe, it was a bad import.

So in summation, yes I tried Cinema Tools, no it didn't work, the re-shoot worked fine, just a bad import job, and from now on when I do decide to shoot 1080i60 @ 24p, I'm going to demand that my DIT personally drag the clips into FCP and drop them on the timeline to make sure they're displaying the proper frame rate that was shot, and if they're not, we'll re-import until they do!:evil:
 
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Something tells me you didn't xfer the original files and went straight from P2 to quicktime. Because if you did you could've re-imported and skip having your DIT verify the frame rate.

For future reference, don't go straight in to FCP. Save the entire original MXF files/metadata to drive A and then import from that to FCP, saving the Quicktime capture scratch to drive B. Now you got an edit drive in quicktime and a back up in MXF original. Put the back up in a safe or someone else's house. Often many of the glitches, corruption, bad imports, etc happen from MXF to Quicktime. I've never experienced bad files in MXF (knock wood). Also, if you have a corrupt QT file, it's often irreparable or bad import. In MXF you can often repair files and always re-import to QT. Also, if you need to do work on other NLE's such as flame, avid, vegas, it's quite easy to do from MXF.

Another route you do is get Raylight and edit directly from the MXF files and bypass the import to QT. Just make a back up drive of the MXF. This route is nice since your always working with the camera original files and you end up with two back ups of the original.
 
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Tim Naylor said:
Something tells me you didn't xfer the original files and went straight from P2 to quicktime. Because if you did you could've re-imported and skip having your DIT verify the frame rate.

For future reference, don't go straight in to FCP. Save the entire original MXF files/metadata to drive A and then import from that to FCP, saving the Quicktime capture scratch to drive B. Now you got an edit drive in quicktime and a back up in MXF original. Put the back up in a safe or someone else's house. Often many of the glitches, corruption, bad imports, etc happen from MXF to Quicktime. I've never experienced bad files in MXF (knock wood). Also, if you have a corrupt QT file, it's often irreparable or bad import. In MXF you can often repair files and always re-import to QT. Also, if you need to do work on other NLE's such as flame, avid, vegas, it's quite easy to do from MXF.
Click to expand...

Hey Tim, thanks for the advice on the workflow, I never thought of doing it that way. And the more I think about it that's way more logical than what we've been doing!
 
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