seasonofpassage
Member
Note: I'm editing with FCP HD.
I responded to a topic a little while back called "24pA stinks", and back then I was in agreement--the majority of the processed footage looked jittery and relatively low-res. No procedure for getting true 24p playback or 3:2 pulldown re-insertion seemed to work; the image looked just as bad played back from a DVD on a TV screen.
Then Barry's book came in the mail, and I learned something new about shooting on a film-like basis: the speed at which you should pan or move the camera. I didn't know about the seven-second rule, and I most certainly didn't know about the individual guides that were in the book. So, Barry--a profound thank you. The book and DVD have been invaluable thus far.
So now about 50-60% of the jitteryness has been explained; all I needed to do was count how long it took for a certain object to pass by from left to right, or right to left, or whatever.
But there's still the other 40% or so that has problems on a static or very slowly moving angle, with very little to moderate movement in the frame at all. I think a better way to identify this--other than strobing or choppiness--would be the presence of split frames. Barry hinted at the idea that Apple may not have documented the pulldown-removal process in FCP very well. So my basic question is: After you do pulldown removal and place the clip in a 23.98 sequence, is there still supposed to be an intermediate split frame there (as in: A, B, BC, C, D)? Because now that I've taken a closer look at it, a lot of the clips don't look markedly different after pulldown removal than they did before. I thought that it might be a case where the capture process failed to remove the pulldown, but on some of the clips, I tried selecting the option for it under 'Tools' and it said there was no pulldown to remove. It also identified the sequence as running at 23.98. But there's still the split frame. Is this supposed to be the case? If it is, cool. If not--hey, I'll dive into the timeline and manually erase each split frame, if that's what it takes.
Oh, one other thing. I've pretty much been alternating between shutter speeds of 1/24 and 1/48 so far; I know that projectors in theaters use a shutter speed of 1/48 to display film on the screen, but using this speed on 24p or 24pA footage sometimes seems to be asking for trouble; because the frame is sharper and contains less motion blur, it's easier to induce strobing. On a shoot where the majority of mobile shots are going to be done handheld as opposed to a dolly or camera boom, would it be better to use the 1/24 shutter speed? The frame isn't as refined, but it shows next to no strobing--and it still looked like film (that was the one part of the DVD that I didn't totally agree with). So I figure that since I've opened back up to doing 24pA (which means I don't have to reshoot everything thus far, thank God), is shooting at 1/24 a disadvantage over 1/48 for a film-out or a 24p DVD? I figure that if it ends up going to a film out, the projector's going to play it at 1/48 shutter speed anyway. Would this be a good idea, bad idea...?
Oh, BTW, Barry...you've now ensured that I'm going to raise $10,000 for the Mini35 as soon as I possibly can. That was the first footage I'd ever seen of the DVX with the attachment on it; I knew it preserved a 35mm DOF, but I had no idea that it would look that incredibly good.
I responded to a topic a little while back called "24pA stinks", and back then I was in agreement--the majority of the processed footage looked jittery and relatively low-res. No procedure for getting true 24p playback or 3:2 pulldown re-insertion seemed to work; the image looked just as bad played back from a DVD on a TV screen.
Then Barry's book came in the mail, and I learned something new about shooting on a film-like basis: the speed at which you should pan or move the camera. I didn't know about the seven-second rule, and I most certainly didn't know about the individual guides that were in the book. So, Barry--a profound thank you. The book and DVD have been invaluable thus far.
So now about 50-60% of the jitteryness has been explained; all I needed to do was count how long it took for a certain object to pass by from left to right, or right to left, or whatever.
But there's still the other 40% or so that has problems on a static or very slowly moving angle, with very little to moderate movement in the frame at all. I think a better way to identify this--other than strobing or choppiness--would be the presence of split frames. Barry hinted at the idea that Apple may not have documented the pulldown-removal process in FCP very well. So my basic question is: After you do pulldown removal and place the clip in a 23.98 sequence, is there still supposed to be an intermediate split frame there (as in: A, B, BC, C, D)? Because now that I've taken a closer look at it, a lot of the clips don't look markedly different after pulldown removal than they did before. I thought that it might be a case where the capture process failed to remove the pulldown, but on some of the clips, I tried selecting the option for it under 'Tools' and it said there was no pulldown to remove. It also identified the sequence as running at 23.98. But there's still the split frame. Is this supposed to be the case? If it is, cool. If not--hey, I'll dive into the timeline and manually erase each split frame, if that's what it takes.
Oh, one other thing. I've pretty much been alternating between shutter speeds of 1/24 and 1/48 so far; I know that projectors in theaters use a shutter speed of 1/48 to display film on the screen, but using this speed on 24p or 24pA footage sometimes seems to be asking for trouble; because the frame is sharper and contains less motion blur, it's easier to induce strobing. On a shoot where the majority of mobile shots are going to be done handheld as opposed to a dolly or camera boom, would it be better to use the 1/24 shutter speed? The frame isn't as refined, but it shows next to no strobing--and it still looked like film (that was the one part of the DVD that I didn't totally agree with). So I figure that since I've opened back up to doing 24pA (which means I don't have to reshoot everything thus far, thank God), is shooting at 1/24 a disadvantage over 1/48 for a film-out or a 24p DVD? I figure that if it ends up going to a film out, the projector's going to play it at 1/48 shutter speed anyway. Would this be a good idea, bad idea...?
Oh, BTW, Barry...you've now ensured that I'm going to raise $10,000 for the Mini35 as soon as I possibly can. That was the first footage I'd ever seen of the DVX with the attachment on it; I knew it preserved a 35mm DOF, but I had no idea that it would look that incredibly good.