WOW! Do I really have to go through all that? I've already paid the lab plenty for their telecine, color correction, and transfer to mini dvcam. Do I really need this equipment to get progressive scan? Am I missing something here, b/c it seems like these machines are substitutes for these processes and I'd be wasting the money I've already spent and losing all the color correction help.
Sorry if I poorly explained myself, but is this really necessary for me? The machines do sound interesting though, and I'm passing that link to a friend who's been complaining about his lab cost a lot lately.

One of the feature of DVFilm Maker software is that it can back up 24P progressive video to mini-DV and bring it back again without any rerendering of the frames. This is a pretty useful feature in that it helps avoid the situation you're in. It calls this a 2:3:3:2 pull-down and is used for archiving 24P video to NTSC MiniDV.

I guess it won't help you now though!

Go through your video one frame at a time (make sure to set the project to 24p). If each frame looks discrete, then you don't need to do anything more. However, if you find you have lots of video frames that are actually blends of two separate film frames, then you will be limited in some of the things you want to do. You can still edit and view the video, and it will look good, but you cannot do anything that assumes that you have descrete, progressive frames.

Damn it, there are the blended frames or jaggies that you mentioned. On a completely different note, the video looks sharper when set to preview full then when set to best full. This happens only after I change the settings to 24p.
So, is there a setting to capture film material in the future so it will be progressive, or is the only way to use the machines you mentioned?
This would be a major disappointment if it's true.

I've been looking again at my DVFilm Maker software options and noticed that there are "convert 3:2 Pulldown to 24P" and "convert 2:3:3:2 to 24P" options. You might want to try out the demo and see if that helps you:

The help file that goes along with the "convert 3:2 Pulldown to 24P" mode says the following:

Convert 3:2 Pulldown to 24P - Use this option for NTSC which was shot in 24P normal mode with a standard 3:2 pulldown, or with video that originated on 24 frames/sec film, where you wish to edit at 24P for the purpose of transfer to film or to author a 24P DVD.

http://www.dvfilm.com/maker/index.htm

Thanks, Laurence. I'll have to check that out. Not sure how that works differently than Vegas' 3:2 pulldown to 24P, but it is interesting.
The problem is I bought the older version of dv filmmaker and wasn't too impressed. When I made a dvd there were artifacts all over the place and it choked rendering my 11 min movie to the point where I had to render it in 1 min intervals and piece them together.
Thanks for the help!

Musman,
let me clear this up for you. The telecine transfer would have to be either 24p or 24pA, the lab should be able to tell you which they did. You can treat the footage exactly the same as you would the stuff from the DVX 100. It has to go onto tape interlaced, there's no choice, no tape format outside of HD lets you write a frame to tape.

You can use Vegas to remove the pulldown to give you 24 fps with no interlacing. You cannot print that back to tape, you have to add pulldown and convert to 60i but that's no drama either, if you do it as 24pA then the pulldown can again be removed with zero loss during capture.

The choice you need to make is a subtle one. You can leave your footage interlaced and apply FXs or you can work with Vegas in 24p, the look is slightly different depending which way you go.
If you want to output true 24p the only medium you can use is either back to film or DVD.

Hope this clears it up for you.

One other way you can work is have the telecine transfer done to a HD, thats the only way they can keep it 24p, if you're working in DV25 there's no advantage to doing that, this is the normal procedure for DI transfers, typicaly I think the film comes back as one file per frame!

Bob.

I don't think pulldown is relevant to what you are doing, and Vegas cannot remove it, at least not that I know of. The problem you face is really a mechanical issue, namely the fact that your 24p camera and the 24 fps projector have not way of synchronizing with each other. The shutter on your projector may be closed during part of the scan of a particular frame of video, or it might show the last half of one frame and the first part of the next frame during one frame of capture.

When the video is played back, it may look pretty good -- you'll have to decide, because I haven't seen 24p video created by shooting the output of a standard sound projector. However, the one thing I am pretty certain of is that you won't consistently get one frame of film transferring to one frame of video, and that is what you want if you want to treat the transfer as progressive.

Thank you, farss, that makes sense. But if I do want to make the project 24p now, would I need to recapture it and use the settings for use with the dvx100, or can I just prerender the stuff I already have using either the dv 24p inserting 2-3 pulldown or the 2-3-3-2 (which ever the lab used)?

You might need to recapture it with Enable Pulldown Removal on. But having never actually done this I'm not certain. Possibly there's a way to do this after capture. I'm pretty certain there must be as some VCRs don't send the correct flags but Vegas can still cope.
I'd suggest you go back over the white paper seeing as how you've already spent money on this.
You should also check if was transferred as 24p or 24pA.

Bob.

John,
the transfer was done on a REAL telecine, maybe a Cintel. And yes Vegas can do pulldown removal to produce a true 24p project with this type of material.
With a real telecine you do end up with one frame of video per frame of film. The only issue is that unless they transfer to HD then to copy to tape it has to be interlaced. However this isn't an issue, it's NOT the same as shooting video at 60i where there's a temporal separation between when each field is taken. With a telecine transfer a frame is capture and converted to fields but these can be merged with little loss back into frames if it's 24p and with no loss if it's 24pA.

Bob.

I will definitely go back over the white paper. I appreciate your help, Laurence, John, and farss.
Just as a sidenote, wouldn't it be nice if people had bit the bullet years ago and we were using 30 instead of 29.97? Oh well.

There's actually some wierd reason why it's that funny number, something to do with multiples of what the actual film rate is, ir's not exactly 24fps either.

Of course if you're in PAL land you can shoot film at 25 fps and then life gets very simple.

And just when you thought we had a chance to get it right, it seems down here they're going to broadcast HD at 25 fps!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but 25 is not that bad a number, especially to convert to 24. I was told it was when you started dealing with fractions and 29.97 etc that things got bad.
Round numbers- good, numbers with anything but 0 after the decimal- bad.

Well, yes it IS a good number, except it seems it isn't one of the number the rest of the world is using!
Seems the standard is 24 fps for HD, I'm not that certain of this but it would seem some technocrat in this country has decided we'll use a different transmission system to very other PAL country. If this is the case them someone is going to make a motza on realtime HD conversion gear. If noting will play out our transmission format then it'll have to be converted during transmission.

Hope I've been misled.

Bob.