Removing Cineframe 24 from 60i

Editing a feature in fcp 6.0.4 that was shot with the Sony HVR Z1 in 60i to tape,
1080 hdv.
Captured with Prores (reg, not hq).

The footage has motion that behaves like pulldown was added, so I believe the camera
was in Cineframe 24 mode.

I'm seeing extreme interlacing on frames 3 & 4. When I use media manager to transcode
to the "Kona" version of Prores, the extreme interlacing is gone, but it has what appears as
a duplicate frame of frame 4.

Looking for suggestions to get the motion to not appear as studdery as visible pulldown
makes it look. really I would just prefer the look of true 60i.

Thanks,
Paul Buhl

If what you want is 60i, you're out of luck. You can't get it with the footage you have. Only 24 frames were recorded per second, and there's no way to make up for that.

But the good news is that you can remove the pulldown from the footage and cut it as 23.976. To do this, run it through Compressor with the "reverse telecine" deinterlacing option turned on. Compressor will (seemingly magically) detect the 3:2 cadence and remove the duplicate frame, reordering the fields to give you clean 24p footage.

(I'm not sure what you mean by "the Kona version of ProRes." There's just plain old ProRes 422, and ProRes 422 HQ. It probably doesn't matter which you use here, but I'd go with HQ unless I were severely constrained for storage or disk bandwidth.)

Thanks Jeff,

will try Compressor for sure.

What I mean by Kona ProRes is in the fcp media manager recompress
drop down there is an option called Kona ProRes 422, which definitely looks
tighter than the ProRes 422 codec it was captured in, (which came up as HDV ProRes
in my capture settings) (Kona ProRes is not available in the capture settings, just
media manager). I understand that ProRes should be ProRes and I'm taking the footage
out of the HDV mpeg gop realm upon capture, but there is a distinct difference when
I recompress the captures with the Kona ProRes that appears in the media manager.

I was reading up on Cineframe and got the impression that it wasn't really a 24fps
stream with pulldown added for tape, but some hybrid trick (I guess what isn't in
prosumer land) so I got some hope that I could get back to 60i, but it sounds like
not.
My fear now is that if I get it to 23.976, and make a progressive DVD for festival
submissions, who knows if they will be watching it on a progressive system or an
interlaced system adding back the pulldown, and I'll have no idea what they'll be
seeing for motion at that point, kind of worries me.
I feel like I'd rather play around with it in 60i land (sequences and mpeg2 output)
so I know what it will look like on an interlaced system as an interlaced DVD.

Thanks again, your response was very helpful.

Paul Buhl

here's something interesting from Adam Wilt:

Cutting to the chase: CF24 cherry-picks fields from the camera's 60i video stream to simulate the juddery motion of 24p. However, the motion is worse (more uneven, more syncopated) than true 24p imagery, and it cannot be reverse-telecined to get smooth 24fps imagery. CF24 is fine as a special effect if you're staying on video at 60i, but it's not suitable for a true 24fps feel, nor will it work for film-outs: the motion is too unsmooth, and the vertical resolution of the image is damaged. For film-outs, shoot at 60i and use a program like DVFilm's Maker or your film-out facility's own in-house process to convert 60i to 24p.

Cineframe 24 appears to be mixing and matching a witches' brew of field-doubled, frame-based, and synthesized images in its five frame cycle.

Cineframe is the absolute worse 24p emulation you can get on a camera. Can't reverse telecine, and it doesn't even look good at 60i. I take that back, the CineFrame mode on their PD150 was actually WORSE. Took 30fps and made it 15fps...by doubling frames. THAT was crap.

Sorry mate


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Hi everyone,
I'm having the same problem (unwanted cineframe 24 mode). I'm wondering what is the correct process to reverse telecine the footage using compressor. What I want to do is turn the footage into true 24p. Should I convert to prores? which compressor preset should I use and how should I modify it? Also I have footage shot in regular 1080 60i that I want to be able to cut with the cineframe footage. As the project is going to film I thought I could convert both the cineframe and the regular material to 24p and edit the whole thing in 23.98. Would this work?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Lucas

Don't bother. Sony's Cineframe 24 mode cannot be reverse-telecined. You also can't convert 60i material to 24 without a ton of processing. If you're mixing 24 and 60 material in the same project ? which you're not doing here, since Cineframe 24 is not in any way a 24-frame format ? the correct solution is to insert 3:2 into the 24 material and cut it all on a 60 timeline.

Lucas,

just curious, are you working with HDV (mpeg2/gop) in your sequence?
I have had great results capturing HDV to prores, much better for editing and color correction.
If you captured in HDV, I would still recompress with media manager to prores (I didn't use HQ
but test HQ option for yourself) just for the ease of editing and absolutely for color correction.

The issue with cineframe and duplicated fields is very difficult. I did not find a way to successfully remove the dups. However, make sure your sequence is set to 1080x1440, NOT 1080x1920,
you will see a much better result and accurate display of what the footage plays like. HDV is stored on the tape as 1080x1440, squished to 4:3. (FCP will display the footage as 1080x1920 16:9 in this setting)

In my case, I wanted to stay with 60i output, not 24p, because of my final DVD needs for festival screeners. In your case you are going to film out, which is great, but I would highly recommend cutting everything as 60i, (get the cineframe as best you can) and let the film house take care of the reverse telecine to film. They SHOULD be able to do a MUCH better job than FCP or any other prosumer software can.

Bottom Line:

Convert HDV to ProRes
Work in 60i 1080 x 1440
Let Film House convert to 24p

Paul Buhl
[www.acifilms.com]
774-521-9000

Hi all,

Thanks for the replies and sorry for being away so long.

Jeff:

What do you mean by insert 3:2? As I understand Cineframe is not 24p but rather 60i. How would inserting pulldown help?

Paul:

I'm going to give prores a shot for colour correction and see the difference.

Thanks again guys!

Lucas