widescreen won't stay put/2:3:3:2 Pulldown problems

[Shattered Brain Group]

I did a short film in 24p advanced DV with the Canon XL2. When I captured the footage onto fcp, I used a 2:3:3:2 pulldown removal. It should have made the video go into 30p but it didn't. Plus I used a 2.35:1 widescreen in the project, but when I did some keyframing and zoom in's, The footage dragged the widescreen with it. How do I fix those?:huh:

 

[CaptainMench]

Wow - lots of issues here.

I'm a little concerned that you don't understand quite what you shot.

24pA on the XL2 means that it recorded 24 progressive frames, but when going to tape it combined the 4th and the 1st to make a 5th. Each 5 frames has one combined frame... thus, 6 groups of 4 make 24 and 6 groups of 5 make 30.

THAT is the pulldown cadence. You want FCP to REMOVE the cadence and give you back the native 6 groups of 4 that the camera actually shot.

Ok... so - knowing that the tape has 29.97 on it use the 29.97 advanced pulldown removal preset.

If FCP did it correctly you should now have 23.98 material and edit that in a 23.98 timeline.

As for your widescreen matte... you should always (ALWAYS) hold off on adding a matte like that to the entire sequence until AFTER you complete the project. Or, at least do it this way:

Duplicate the sequence.
Remove EVERYTHING from the timeline... just erase it all!!
Drag the original sequence INTO the timeline of the new sequence
Add your widescreen matte to that

Any changes in the cut on the ORIGINAL timeline/sequence should be reflected in the new one too.

What was happening to you - or what you should have figured out... was that any basic motion you would add would happen at a higher level than the filters you put on the clip itself and would then affect those filters.

The other option is to add a video layer above and put a photoshop file with the proper maskings there. But more than likely that would cause a huge render nightmare.

Good luck, hope this clears things up a bit for you.

CaptM