Ugh! Huge Problems! Advaned Pulldown...............

Using FCP 5.1.2

Capturing from a JVC BRHD50.

Footage is 24PA

The problem is this:

FCP will not allow me to remove advanced pulldown. I get the following error message when I try to capture with the advanced pulldown setting:

"Clips with broken VFR/Pulldown Cadence"

Which, afterwards does not even capture the clip. My logged clip remains offline.

And I get this error message after I capture NTSC Anamorphic and try to removed pulldown using Tools>Advanced Pulldown removal:

"! Break in Advanced Pulldwon Cadence (pattern) found near t."

All of my un pulldown removed footage after capture looks like it has some dropped frames and every so often there appear to be digital hits (which are not on the tapes because they are inconsistant).

Does anyone know what's going on?

Does anyone know what'sg

Your capture didn't complain about dropped frames? Do you ever get the Spinning Beach Ball Of Death? This is a pretty plain capture error. One frame in the wrong place will kill the cadence and any hope of removing the pulldown.

Koz

Thanks for the reply.

No. It doesn't tell me there is a capture problem.

What can I do to fix this?

Can you capture Some Other Way? If you're capturing to an external array now, try capturing to an internal drive. Change something.

If you produce a fresh 10-min videotape of the camera looking at the goldsfish, can you capture that? It's remotely possible the camera is producing the signal wrong.

Koz

I am capturing to a raid.

I tried capturing to one of my firewire drives. It doesn't change anything.

I don't have access to the camera. Just the tapes and the JVC Deck.

And it's a given that you don't have access to any tapes not part of this show, right?

I'm just about licked.

Where is it written that the pulldown is Advanced? There is more than one way to get from 24 to 30.

Oh, wait. All those decks have the ability to black a tape with an internal black or test pattern generator. Make a short tape and capture that. You don't have any blank, fresh tapes, do you?

Koz

Can we rule out dirty heads on the deck? A faulty deck?

Scott

Our client told me that it was shot in 24PA....perhaps he's misinformed? Possibly...afterall he initially told me it was HDV footage.....

I can try to black a tape but that won't allow me to capture the blacked footage in advanced pulldown removal will it?



Scott- I tried cleaning the deck, and I hooked up a DSR-45 and am expieriencing the same problem.

Thanks for all your replies (sorry about the multiple threads, I thought maybe someone would know the answer to one problem and not the other)

<<<Can we rule out dirty heads on the deck? A faulty deck? >>>

razorbabyy took the precaution of starting another thread with the same problem, so this is now a juggling act. (S)He advised us that (s)he is getting dropped frames and the warning systems and alarms aren't working. I advised him/her to trash the preferences and try again, this being the standard thing to do if FCP refuses to do what you specifically ask it to.

Koz

> Our client told me that it was shot in 24PA....perhaps he's misinformed?

Many people get 24p and 24pA mixed up.

Try this. Open FCP and a blank sequence. Drag the Canvas window out big. Now launch Log and Capture (its size should be enlarged because the Log and Capture window's size is based on the Canvas' size), control the tape and look at the image frame-by-frame in the Log and Capture window. You should be able to see which frames have BC and CD fields. If it's 24p, not Advanced, then every two frames out of a set of five (the third and the fourth) will be interlaced with jagged edges while the others are fine -- that would be ordinary 2:3 pulldown.


www.derekmok.com

<<<Our client told me that it was shot in 24PA>>>

There is a really great quote and I can't remember the whole thing, but it works out to the client is never wrong. Misinformed, perhaps..etc..etc...etc, but never wrong.

Do you have access to any other members of the team--like the camera operator?

<<<a DSR-45 and am expieriencing the same problem. >>>

That's sort of too bad. That means the machines in the middle are probably OK. That leaves the actual tapes and the Final Cut's interpretation of what's going on. Especially if you were able to capture but the stand-alone pulldown removal failed.

But you said you were reasonably sure you had dropped frames......!@#$%$#

I'm still flopping around here. Can you get the tape machine to tell you what you have? Sometimes buried way down in the menus--or lights on the front. Are there smudged ball-point pen scratchings on tape #1? That's usually where shoot data is recorded.

Yo, Taylor. You got any friends that might know?

Koz

>>Yo, Taylor. You got any friends that might know?

Not really. I have no expertise in this area myself, just a loaded shotgun. But I am intrigued by the suggestion that this is not "advanced" pulldown and maybe "regular" pulldown would be successful. I don't see yet where that has been tried.

Scott

So....let's say it's "regular pulldown"

How would I go about capturing and puting it in a timeline so this all looks nice and pretty?

What's my next step?

Could it possibly be a firewire issue?

Gaaah!

Oh and Kazikowski...I'm a male, LOL.

<<<Oh and Kazikowski...I'm a male, LOL.>>>

OK, let's test that theory. How many fingers am I holding up?

Just kidding (Three, by the way. Men guess a number to resolve the silly conflict and women ask me why I want to know in order to start a lower case "r" relationship.)


Do that thing that Mok suggested up a ways. That will tell us whether you have advanced (3:2:2:3) or regular (3:2) pulldown. That will go a long way to telling us which tools you should be using.

Do you still get dropped frames if you do a straight capture?

Koz

I'm encoding a DVD right now so i'll try what Derek suggested in a bit.

Yeah, I'm getting dropped frames still. The thing is, FCP does not abort on the dropped frames as I have told it to in preferences.....

When I say "dropped frames" I mean liittle millisecond blips of dissapeared video and audio---like a jump cut which occasionally causes the audio to drift out of sync...........

LEt me just say this has been a nightmare and my boss went off on the guy who gave us this job last night. There are other issues making this hard to edit, like time of day time code on B-Roll shots so I have to log around the time code jumps and OF COURSE the camera man didn't wait 3-5 seconds to start a pan or a tilt so...yeah.......

> When I say "dropped frames" I mean liittle millisecond blips of dissapeared video and audio---
> like a jump cut which occasionally causes the audio to drift out of sync...........

On the tape or on the captured clips?

If the latter, that could be your computer or your deck. Clean the heads on the deck and make sure you're capturing to a drive that can handle your format and data stream. Make sure no drive connected to your system is over 90 per cent full after the allotted space for the captured clips.

If the former, then aside from a faulty/dirty deck, you may be out of luck. Check to make sure the tapes are shot in SP mode. If they were shot in LP, try using the camera that had produced the footage to capture. Are you sure the crew didn't leave the tape baking in the sun or rotting in a jeans pocket for hours? That would mangle your tape until it's unsalvageable, and cause the exact problems you're describing.

> like time of day time code on B-Roll shots so I have to log around the time code jumps and
> OF COURSE the camera man didn't wait 3-5 seconds to start a pan or a tilt

With glitches like this on tape and multiple timecode breaks, your only shot may be to redub the tapes with fresh timecode. Or capture with a Non-Controllable Device setting. If the tape was damaged by mishandling, though, you're doomed.


www.derekmok.com

It's definatly not the deck. We cleaned it and tried with a different deck and we're receiving the same problems.

We're capturing to a raid that has abvout 1.9 tb left on it...so i know it's not that......

It's entirely possible tha tapes are bad.

I'll try dubbing to another tape and see how that works.

Again, thanks for all your help.

I think I had a problem like this but the program arrived as a .mov already edited (sort of unwittingly) on a 30fps AVID timeline. The pulldown had been randomized, and the original editor wasn't even aware that the footage was originally 24p... or even 24AP. To this day, I'm still not sure, but doing a reverse telecine demanded that I keep changing the frame cadence to keep the "fields" intact. The otherwise uncompensated renders showed massive tearing on action, as fields went out of order. Changing field dominance had no efffect.
All in all, I think that 2:3:3:2 is actually pretty clever, but it should NEVER be edited in 29.97. Save yourself the grief and do it in 24... JUST DO IT. Saves storage space, too. Make sure you've got the right codecs selected for capture. There is a special one for advanced pulldown...

JPO