Mixing frame rates – Offline and Online Edits

I'll be starting a feature project in Adobe Premiere soon. The footage consists of many different codecs with 3 frame rates: 24, 29.97, and 59.94.

I was wondering if the best plan of attack would be to transcode everything to ProRes with one frame rate or to edit everything natively.

If I do conform everything to one frame rate, how do I reconnect the original source footage for the online edit? Since the frame rates will be different, the timecodes will have changed as well. Just wondering if there was a simple way of doing this without having to track down each individual shot.

Thanks!

If you transcoded Premiere would export a lot faster. If Premiere can just dump those frames directly into a new file without changing them it can export really fast. I rarely use filters on an offline cut so exports of a 90 min movie take about 6 minutes (mainly for the audio). Over time this could add up to a lot more time saved than the initial transcode cost you.

But as you correctly identified, this could cause problems when reconnecting back to the online media. The only way I can think of doing this would be to also transcode the online media to the new frame rate. I can see why you would not want to go down this road but that footage will need to be converted to the new frame rate at some point in the process anyway.

So it really depends on whether you want to save that export time or not. If it were me, I would transcode it. It could also prevent problems where Premiere and another app like Resolve may interpolate the frames differently and produce different results.

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Jon's advice reflects my experience exactly. II've been working on archival footage form many many sources and formats like MPG and WMV, at various frame rates. The highest rez editions all go to ProRes422HD progressive, square, 29.97, and exports sail through. If I had CPU issues, I could generate ProRes LT's, but these are short piece son five minutes or less.

My only concern is that I handle 24-to-29.97, and especially 25-to-29.97 Fps clips which I've been warned is tough to do without special procedures. Is this something a Teranex 2D box can handle well?

Best, as always.
Loren S. Miller

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