Editing PAL in FCP

I'm being sent some PAL footage to edit. I've never used PAL footage before. I'm running FCP 4.5, on a dual 2 G5, OS 10.3.9.

3 questions.

Can you edit PAL footage in FCP just by choosing the right capture and sequence settings?

When done, can I export it either as PAL or NTSC? And re: the latter, are there serious image anomalies transferring between formats?

I don't have a PAL deck to capture. I can rent one, but alternately, I can ask the client in England to capture the footage there, export Quicktime movies, and send to me on a hard drive. Will that work? Do QT movies come in NTSC or PAL flavors, or is QT just QT?

Thanks.

choose the right pal sequence settings, import the pal Quicktime clips and edit in your pal Timeline

export will be in pal / you can transcode when exporting but you are better of to transcode the seq before. ( size and frequence rate) Nattress plugs do a great job at it for instance

Yep agreed - work natively in PAL then convert to NTSC later.

I would go for the rental of deck especially if your viewing monitor is multiformat ie: handles PAL/NTSC.

The shipping of the HDD might be more costly - I would check first.

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Do QT movies come in NTSC or PAL flavors, or is QT just QT?

Yes PAL or NTSC or any other format you can use with QT, basically QT is a wrapper for the CODEC. In this case you'll be working with FCP/QT in a PAL CODEC thats all.

You might like to read up about the PAL format a bit before you start (check google) but essentially PAL is much easier to work with than NTSC.



A few things you should know:

D1 Digital PAL and PAL DV is CCIR601 or ITU-R BT 601


Framesize is 720x576 non-square pixels for both 4:3 & 16:9FHA


25 frames per second on 50 interlaced fields per second


8-bit 4:2:2 on Digibeta & DVCpro50

8-bit 4:1:1 on DVCpro25

8-bit 4:2:0 on DV/DVCAM


It's Upper field first on Digibeta

It's Lower field first on DV


Audio is usually 48kHz 16-bit.

The digital broadcast picture size is actually 702x576* with the 9 pixels left and 9 pixels right kept blank (usually black curtains).

Any queries when you get started, drop me a Private Message and I'll do my best to help you out.


Good luck

Ben


*This is important when creating graphics in a square pixel format (in Photoshop for instance) but I'll be putting a "things you should know" about PAL up on the FAQ soon, but haven't had much free time yet. Look out for that when it's up.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Here's something to be aware of. A couple of years ago we got a PAL project to edit. After the footage had been digitized I sat down to edit and noticed a weird flicker in the picture. On closer examination we decided it was not really a flicker but more like a pulsing in the brightness. The assistant and I tried capturing different ways all to now avail. When the Australian clients came in they watched the footage, said it looked great and went away. Some searching on various forums turned up the phrase "NTSC eyes". Which is the flicker that people who are used to 29.97 FPS NTSC see when they first watch 25 FPS PAL. I was told I would adjust, and I did in a few days. A month later we hired another editor and his first day, you guessed it, he came to me complaining about our flickering footage, he got used to it too.

Yep I get that editing 24fps footage opposed to 25fps - its amazing how your eyes/brain can notice the difference so easily.

You'll find you can see it more out of your peripheral vision which is more sensitive to light/dark flicker caused by the fields of interlaced video and refresh Hz scan rate of a CRT.

Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

i dont get it...
how come you don't come out of the (24fps) movies complaining about "flicker"

as for me (a PAL editor) i see 30p or 60i as unnaturally "smooth"!


nick

Hey Nick

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how come you don't come out of the (24fps) movies complaining about "flicker"

Firstly because its more noticable on a small screen when you have reference to steady images in the majority of your visual field.

In a cinema you have most of your visual field either black ie: no detail to reference or filled by the cinema screen and you brain adjusts more quickly.

The other reason is that projected images like cinema and other display technologies like LCD refresh the whole image in frame at-a-once. Unlike CRTs which use horizontally scanned & interlaced technology which has its own additional flicker on top of the "flicker" from the frame refresh rate.

Eg: For each single PAL or NTSC frame on a CRT TV/Monitor it flickers twice. Once for the odd or upper field and once for the even or lower field.

Your brain can adjust quite quickly to all manner of weird visual oddities, one experiment I read about. The test subjects wearing prism glasses to create a vertically flipped image. The subjects brain literally adjusted to the new view on the world as if it were normal in ridiculously short space of time.

You can test your flicker sensitivity on a CRT Computer Monitor (if you still use one) by setting the refresh rate to difference Hz. See how long it takes to stop noticing the flicker at different Hz rates.

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as for me (a PAL editor) i see 30p or 60i as unnaturally "smooth"!

LOL Nick, it sounds like an advert for Supernatural Veet/Immac!!!


Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]