Oh no, I never converted to 24p. I don't like the loss of resolution that happens in Vegas when you do that and DVFilmmaker doesn't convert to 24p. It only deinterlaces.

>>>DVFilmmaker doesn't convert to 24p. It only deinterlaces.<<<

Are we talking about the same program? I am talking about DvFilm Maker. From the website: "DVFilm Maker, release 1.06, converts NTSC Quicktime or AVI movie files to 24P DV Quicktime if the video was recorded in the Advanced 24P (2:3:3:2 pulldown mode) on the DVX100. It does the conversion without recompression of the data, so there is no loss in quality."

Now before you say anything - in reading about the new version it says that "the 24P options can only be used with the Panasonic DVX100 camera in 24P Advanced mode" so maybe it has changed. I have not tried it since pre-1.06 version and at that time it seemed to "convert" 30i to 24p. If all it does now is deinterlace it seems the only footage it would be good for is that - I mean interlaced. If you shot 30P it would do nothing for you. This is where the new info gets me confused. I am editing a feature shot 30p and it does not look like film. If I convert it to 24p it looks like film. the same goes for 30i > 24p. So running it through DvFilm Maker would deinterlace already deinterlaced frames? Oh I dunno. Sorry...off on a tangent.

Anyhow - going back to what I said before - somewhere on this forum there was a discussion about DvFilm Maker and how to use it, or not use it, with VV. It sticks out in my mind because when VV 4.0b I think came out it was able to do 24p and handle native footage and it was aksed if DvFilm Maker was needed anymore. This was back in..um...April? May? But beyond this - if all it does is convert 30i > 30p than what you said would be correct - Project settings should be at "Fields: None" and resample off. As I said I am cutting a film shot in 30p so I created a template from the pre-set NTSC DV setting. All I did was change the fileds setting to "none" and save it as "NTSC 30p DV". Say here is a question for you - when you bring the footage into VV does it read as progressive or do you have to set the fields manually?

On the VV side - did you try to take your 30i footage and save it in a 30p project using supersampling?

Filmy-

Thanks for the response. We're definitely talking about the same program. But I used a pd150 to shoot on rather than the dvx-100. Wish I had the pan, but oh well. Also, dyslexia boy misread from the dv film maker's web site and thought it could convert any 60i footage (when you wrote 30i you meant 60i, right?) to 24p. It won't though, it only does things like that with the dvx100 stuff, and I gather now that vegas will do that w/o help from Dv Film Maker.
For my project I took the 60i footage and undersampled to .55 or .667 (differing from scene to scene a bit) then applied velosity envelopes to speed things up. This is all to get that choppy sped up look that we associate with silent films. My short is a take off on silent films, and unsteady hand cranked cameras with their inevitable varing frame rates, so this seems to work pretty well. Either from the undersampling for the speed change I lose resolution and there are some other problems, but this is the best I can do.
Anyway, when I open clips that I've use DV filmmaker on vegas does not recognize it as progressive. The main properties shows the default settings and when I right click on the event it also has settings set to lower field first. I've played around with the settings in both places and watched the results on my external monitor (a regular tv) and my lcd computer monitor and the results don't look any different as far as I can see whether I set things to progressive or lower field first. This is beyond my understanding.
So, I am going to leave things at the none (progressive) and no method of deinterlacing. I actually just emailed DV Filmmaker for the recommended settings with Vegas and if anyone's interrested, let me know and I'll post them here.
>On the VV side - did you try to take your 30i footage and save it in a 30p project using supersampling?
-I have never used supersampling. Do you think that would help with this project?

musman,
Be very careful here. I'm no expert having never actualy done this but I have done a lot of research and as an engineer I think I have a fair grap on the top.

Just some background (remembe I don't live in NTSC land!).

The DVX100 takes 24 full frames / sec. So that that can be recorded it then does a pull down to produce 60i. However the fields that go to make up one frame have no temporal separation, just the same as film would after being telecined.

Now assuming you'd shot using 24pA you can then convert to true 24p with no loss, if its regular 24p there is a minute resolution loss that's unavoidable due to how the pulldown was done. Now I know you didn't have the luxury of the DVX100. But what you need to know is that true 24p cannot be PTT, you can make a DVD of it, you can apply pulldown so you still have 60i and print that to tape.

Now you shot this with a PD150. There is no way that you can convert 50i or 60i to 24p without either significant risk of interlace artifacts or esle major resolution loss. You can either merger fields to produce one frame and hope that motion compensation can line the fields up or you can just ditch every second field and use line doubling. Either way something has to give.

There is some expensive boxes that do a half decent job, I guess if you're just going for the old film look then you're not to worried about these issues.

BTW old film was shot at less than 24 fps, that didn't start until the talkies came along.

Hope I haven't blinded you with science, trouble being an engineer. I just hate working with anything I don't fully understand.

A few things -

Supersampling would help to add in between frames in doing slow motion. However for what you are doing to start off with I am not sure it would work - I mean you want the look of 15 - 18 fps projected at 24 fps (or in this case 30 fps) so if you did that and than put it back to "normal" with supersampling you would be adding all those in-between frames you just speant all that work to get rid of, Make sense? On the other hand for adding frames in the 30i > 30p sense it might look better. It was suggested by someone in these forums that if you were going to 24p you could perhaps take your normal DV footage and resample using a supersamle setting of 2 and that would, in theory, create the 60i (or 60p depending on the settings) and that would make it much easier, and smoother, to go to 24p. I know in After Affects if you use the Twixtor plug-in it recomends doing about the same thing.

As far a preview goes with the settings on upper, lower or none I am not sure you would see a differance overall. However we are talking about rendering wise and if you have progressive footage marked as upper field first and render it to a lower or none setting you will be recompressing when you do not need to. You will also be messing up the overall settings and sort of re-interlacing the deinterlaced footage. If that footage is progressive you need to manually set the fields to none, if you do not than outputting from VV will cause the footage to decompress what it thinks is interlaced and recompress and try to deinterlace footage that you already have deinterlaced. That is why I say the preview probably would not make you "see" anything. Your idea is to put it into VV and have it oputput unchanged, so to speak, means you need to match settings - progressive in = progressive out.

Now here is somehting of intrest - at least to me - I posted this a bit ago and I found this at DMN and it is something that may help you with what you are doing. You may need to think reverse of this because this is slowing footage down and you sort of want to speed it up. Anyway - here:

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take a clip and slow it down by control-stretching it down to 1/4 the original length and render it to a new track. Then put the original clip back to the normal time/length. Then stretch the new video track to 4x the new length and it will be the original length again, mute out the new audio and render the new video track with the original audio. I did this to a clip but repeated the first step to slow it down to about 1/16 of the original length, and then brought it back to the original length. I know there is probably an easier way of doing this but the effect is cool, its looks like slow motion but it is normal speed, it just has a lot of generated between frames, and the audio is normal so it sounds normal.
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