Which does lead to the bleeding obvious question of why do you need to do that anyway, I'm straining my brain trying to figure this one out, and not just the using Premiere part.

The only cameras that would have shot 24p also only shoot at NTSC res, so if I'm guessing you're also going to need to do a frame size conversion.

I shot a feature in 25p with a DVX-100E in "letterbox" mode as opposed to a 24p DVX-100 with an anamorphic lens (actually, I shot in "matte" mode, if you will, as I add the black bars later and tape the monitor).

This resulted in an equivalent or arguably better image than a 24p DVX-100 anamorphic, at least for the scope of my project. 25p is 4:2:0 as opposed to 4:1:1 (4:2:0 is "better" than 4:1:1 in progressive) and obviously has 96 more horizontal lines. Granted, lines are lost with the addition of black bars, but I prefer to selectively crop to 16:9 in post, as I'm very particular about image framing. In addition, without the anamorphic lens, I could easily filter the image without a matte box, and I didn't have to compose shots in anamorphic "skinny mode", which is annoying if not impossible to do effectively w/o a 16:9 monitor to correct it. At least for me.

The movie was shot run-and-gun style, so I didn't want a freaked-out and very heavy DVX-100 24p camera with all the add-ons to achieve a nearly identical result. IMHO, iIf you're going to load every imaginable option on a DV camera, you may as well shoot HD, as you begin to lose portability when you get too tweaky.

At any rate, the 25p is breathtaking, but I broke the camera twice. The lens assembly on the DVX, I've found, is very delicate. I had to rent a 24p DVX on a few shoot days, so now I have to mix the footage.

I thought about cutting the whole thing in Vegas, but after using Premiere for 10 years, "unlearning" Premiere was much more frustrating than I thought, so I bailed on Vegas for a while and actually started getting stuff done.

Anyhow, I'm just looking for an optimal Vegas path to convert the 24p material that I digitized in Vegas to 25p so I can include it in my existing Premiere 6.5.1 projects. There's quite a few 24p clips, and they were digitized according to Vegas 4.0e's default 24p non-widescreen settings, from 24p Advanced video via an NTSC DVX-100...

- Aron

Spot, can you get the 25fps and 24fps footage to match frame-for-frame in this way - so that the 25fps footage runs 4% faster, but doesn't have any added frames (or fields)? What settings would you use? I've always wondered if there's a way to modify an AVI file so that it assumes a different frame rate without touching the original footage.
-Jens

http://tinyurl.com/2vwyz <- The Sony white paper in this list covers this. ( Press )

4% reduction in programme length but not the number of frames. Also 4% pitch conversion down in frequency.

It is a pity that 24p and 24pA can be imported into an NTSC Vegas4 project with ease. But loading a 24p into a 25p project is a little less obvious. Same goes for 25p to 24p. This seems like a realistic approach to dealing with crossing from film distribution cadence in a modern editor and with DVDA only knowing 50i or 24p in addition to NTSC 59.94i.

Not so much a complaint as a suggestion.

How I'd like it to work:
You'd expect to import your footage and have the timeline honour the original timing (so the PAL project with NTSC would be the same duration but become a different number of frames if rendered out with project matching settings). Then if you control-drag the right hand side of the clip leftwards, I'd expect something to snap or shore up visually when the 4% reduction had been made and the number of frames in the project was the same as the source. The gadget way of doing this would be to have a Smart-resample option to "match programme length to the number of frames in the source". Then all that would be needed would be the resize technique (crop/scale/position).

When you import 24fps footage into an NTSC project, Vegas can do automatic pulldown, that is, frames are duplicated to arrive at (something around) 60fps. If you do this to get from 24fps to 25fps, the additional frames are really noticeable. Vegas will actually duplicate fields, which makes motion a bit smoother, but especially when the 24fps footage was shot on film, you notice strange effects - for example, hard cuts ain't hard no more. In PAL-land, this is the cause of a lot of hassle when shooting and editing film, because you have to go to video all the time. Many people have started to shoot film at 25fps for this reason (and most cinemas run their projectors slightly faster than 24fps anyway).

I think all that's needed is an option to set the frame rate of the source media. When you import media as an image sequence, you do exactly this in the "media properties" dialog. However, for media that's not an image sequence, the corresponding edit box can't be edited. If you could change this value, then all you'd need to do is change the "24" of your AVI that has the 24p footage to a "25", and you'd have your matching frames and 4% speed change. I know that After Effects allows you to treat AVIs as if they have a different frame rate, so it is possible

As long as this is DV and is marked as NTSC 24p in the header by Vegas on import:
The velocity envelope is the forced way of doing this. 4% increase, then move the clip to line up with the earlier one if one exists.

On the time graticule, with all frames shown, there should be 25 frames in the second interval.

I believe this is correct, but like you just said, it could be more ergonomic for film/PAL integration. Pulldown is an NTSC thing. 23.976/24 is a play-out format strictly speaking, even if the cinema runs this faster somehow. The earlier stages might have any film rate, from 5 to above 150fps.

The Vegas white paper does discus the 4% deal to a reasonable depth. Perhaps a script or a mod to the filmic scripts (3rd party) would be the other tack to take?