Natress, Cinema Tools, Compressor? 720p25 sync with 480p24?

[mograph187]

I am having a great deal of trouble with sync and frame rates for my project and I need your help! I will do my best to explain my situation...

I traveled to London (from Los Angeles) with a band, The Autumns (theautumns.com, myspace.com/theautumns), that I have been shooting a documentary about for quite awhile.

I hired 3 camera ops in London to help me shoot a 4 camera live show. I was shooting with the DVX100a in 24p SD NTSC and the 3 other guys were all using HVX200s in 720p25 (Europe version didn't offer 24p i guess).

In addition to the camera mics audio I also recorded the live audio via a room mic into the Marantz PMD660 (which I love by the way) at 48k.

I am working in FCP 5.1.4 on a MAC PRO Quad 2.6 8GB RAM. I am able get the 48k room mic and the DVX100a 24p footage to sync up fine and they seem to stay in for the entire 45 minute set. BUT how can I also use the 720p25 footage in the same timeline? And ideally even make a multiclip out of them all?

I have tried using Cinema Tools to conform the 25p to 23.976 but that seems to just slow the footage down so much that it looks and sounds like it has been slowed down. And it still won't stay in sync.

I need to be able to use all four cameras' audio AND the 48k room mic to achieve the best mix of sound.

Also, I will be delivering for NTSC DVD (at first) as well as PAL DVD (a month later).

Can anyone please help me figure this out? I have been trying for weeks to get this going and I can't seem to make it work.

I have tried Nattress (although admittedly may not be using it correctly), Compressor (taking all to 29.97 or 24 or 30) and nothing seems to be working.

Thanks in advance for your info!

- scott

 

[Graeme_Nattress]

With 25p / 24p mixed footage, normally you'd either slow the 25p to 24p (in cinema tools), or speed the 24p to 25p. This involves a 4% speed change, which normally is fine. You're complex as you're an audio based edit. Being multi-cam adds another layer of complexity.

I'd be tempted to set up a PAL HD 720p25 project, bring in the audio and see if that syncs to the three cameras. It should. If FCP is set to PAL, it will interperet (or should) the audio as such and it should sync. It sounds like the DVX100 might be more for cutaways, and if so, you'd speed that up to 25p, ignore the audio, and if the cut-ins are short, you shouldn't notice the speed change.

Now you've got everything 25p, which is fine for PAL, and my converter should do a good job of 25p to 29.97fps via modified pulldown, and if you check the external sync, then the PAL audio cut should sync with the converted to NTSC video. (Must convert to an interlaced format for this - either 1080i or 480i)

But really, this is awfully tricky, and what may work in theory may not work in practice.

Other thing would be edit in 29.97fps (with the 24p with added 3:2 pulldown) and the 720p25 converted to SD NTSC as above, and that would be fine for the NTSC version but any conversion of film rate or material back to PAL would be dodgy in the extreme.

Graeme