DVX100-FCP import questions

Thank you for your awesome website; I was referred to you guys by Mr. Ken Stone.
Just starting out as a filmmaker/editor, I shot an entire short film using a Panasonic DVX100 and a DVX100a and I'm now editing in FCP 6.0. I was pretty sure that all of the footage was shot in 24Pa, but after importing to FCP with the Advanced 2:3:3:2 setting, all but one of my clips has an item property vid rate of 29.97fps (just one is in 23.98fps); to make matters worse, I just realized that the FCP timeline is in 30 fps, and I'm about one work-week into the first draft. Upon inspection, the footage is clearly showing a duplicate frame every 5 frames.
Did I miss something on import? Did I do something wrong? Do I need to re-import and start over again to get the desired highest quality 24p film-look, or is there an easy fix?
thanks in advance,
Daniel Kennedy
Beginner Filmmaker

Bumping this cause I split it from another thread and it got kind of lost.

>Do I need to re-import and start over again to get the desired highest quality 24p film-look, or is
>there an easy fix?

For some reason, you seem to have captured wrongly. Are you capturing via firewire? Try recapturing a clip at the correct settings and see if it's 23.98.

Alternatively, capture a long clip from your source tape without removing advanced pulldown. Drop that clip in a 29.97 fps timeline and count the frames in groups of 5 and see if the pulldown is consistent with an advanced pulldown pattern, and to see if it is consistent.

For advanced pulldown, you should have a "jitter" or interlaced frame after every 4 "steady" or progressive frames (after pulldown removal during capture, the jitter frames should be removed).

Advanced pulldown:

2 3 3 2

S S J S S


Normal/standard pulldown (you should have 2 jitter frames after every 3 steady frames):

2 3 2 3

S S J J S



www.strypesinpost.com

Thank you so much for taking the time to help out!
Strypes, I am using firewire (4 pin to 9 pin) and I went ahead and did what you suggested; I re-imported a single DVX100a clip 3 different ways to see what format it was recorded in. I used:
1. Easy Setup NTSC-DV 24p (23.98 Advanced Pulldown Removal)
2. Easy Setup NTSC-DV 24p (23.98)
3. Easy Setup NTSC [no pulldown]
All three captures produced the exact same results in the 29.97 fps timeline: 4 frames consistently followed by a 5th frame that is a repeat of the 4th frame. In terms of progressive vs. interlace, frames "4 and 5" consistently have a slight difference in sharpness but otherwise appear to be clones. All 5 frames are slightly pixelated (especially compared to a 23.98 clip of a different scene successfully captured earlier - that has no full screen pixelation on a 27" imac at all). The clips also are not sound-synced and all have item property vid rates of 29.97fps. The clip was shot in sp.
I also went ahead and experimented on the one good 23.98 clip, shot on a dvx100: ironically, it was shot in Lp and yet has no pixelation at all. I re-captured a small section using the advanced pulldown settings and got the same great results. Then I re-captured with no pulldown; the item property vid rate changed to 29.97fps - and the clip became, for the first time, pixelated.
I experimented on a 3rd clip; using the easy advanced pulldown settings, I imported a small section (ALL clips were originally imported using CAPTURE NOW, by the way, sometimes capturing whole tapes at at a time). The clip was now 23.98 and completely unpixelated!
It seems that changing the capture settings is working sometimes but not always. Also, it seems the problem is appearing only on film from the dvx100a, which WAS showing the red blinking PSG NG message during shooting.
Sorry for the information overload, but I hope that helps. Do you have any thoughts on how to bring everything up to par?

OK, I ran the dv tapes from the camera through a monitor and, using step adv, it appeared that all of my DVX100a footage was done in 2:3:2:3 (24p), while the DVX100 footage was done in 2:3:3:2 (24Pa).
So, how do I put the 24p footage in a 23.98 timeline without the pixelation/loss of quality? I checked the fcp faq wiki but the solution cited was for an older version of fcp.
Thanks in advance!

> So, how do I put the 24p footage in a 23.98 timeline without the pixelation/loss of quality?

With capturing DV 24pN via FireWire, you have to capture at 29.97fps (ie. normal DV presets), then run the clips through Cinema Tools for a reverse telecine to get 23.98fps clips. The Advanced Pulldown Removal in FCP, on the fly, will not yield proper results; that setting is strictly for 24pA (hence "Advanced".


www.derekmok.com

You rock, Derek. Thank you; that worked like a miracle. I'm just going to re-capture my 24pa footage with the proper settings, reverse telecline the 24p footage, then re-source all data in my 29.98 timeline sequence to the "new" clips. Then I'll drag the sequence to a 23.98 timeline; I think that should get me back to where I was, but with the optimal quality I was looking for... right, guys? What say you?

>All three captures produced the exact same results in the 29.97 fps timeline: 4 frames
>consistently followed by a 5th frame that is a repeat of the 4th frame.

That is a 2:2:2:4 pulldown. Very old pulldown which repeats the fourth frame. Yea, cinema tools, jes deinterlacer, Compressor... They all remove pulldown.



www.strypesinpost.com