control+drag.

Thanks. Hold down the control key and drag the right edge of the clip to the proper length.

In this case the easiest way to do this is to set resample. You have 18fps that you want to extend to 25fps (noting that koalas are Australian marsupials), so Vegas needs to interpolate frames to extend 18 to 25. Can apply this to track or to clips. Right click on clip/track/project, click properties, look at resample options ("smart" is default so the cntrl_drag also works) and enter the numbers required (1.3888 comes to mind). I would be tempted to render this out to avi to provide a 25fps "cutting print" with normal PAL properties, but that's an old and probably unnecessary precaution against fumble fingers.

Thanks so much, I appreciate your quick reply. It sounds very straight forward. I had been hoping that it could be done. I've been sitting on these tapes and not taking the plunge to get them converted because it's going to cost a lot of money and so before doing that I wanted to be 100% sure I could take the one frame to one frame output, edit and then output at 'normal' speed without having the jerky, speeded up look that 18fps film has.

I've been searching around the forum and looking at some discussions on the 'disable resampling' via 'Switches' on the event timeline. I think there might be a way where I can disable resampling to ensure I'm editing on the 'real' 18fps film and then switch back on the resampling to output to PAL's 25fps for the final video. Do you think this makes sense or have I got my understanding about this completely wrong?

Unfortunately, because I haven't taken the plunge to convert the tapes to digital yet, I don't have any converted film to test so I'm trying to get to grips with the theory of Vegas!

Serena

Your post came in whilst I was writing my last reply - thanks very much and it looks like I was heading on the right track with the disable resample thing. Thanks very much for clarifying it. I think given the 2 methods I'm safe going for the conversion with the frame for frame and doing the speed reduction in Vegas.

I'm very grateful for your quick replies and I feel a bit happier that I won't be wasting my money.

I would also suggest that you select "disable resample" in the clip properties. With resampling on Vegas will fade from one frame to the next which can soften the image markedly and cause very annoying ghosting when there is movement. With resampling off Vegas will duplicate frames as necessary rather than mixing them.

edit ----

Oops, i need to learn to read more carefully before replying. I see you already mentioned the topic of disabling resampling. My suggestion is that you leave it off even while rendering.

Thanks Chienworks - I'm going to print this page off and pin it up so I don't forget all the helpful tips.

Before you spend all that money, have you tried doing your own conversion?

You can project onto a white card or wall and shoot straight onto video. The quality is not quite as pristine as a proper telecine, but I've had very acceptable results, particularly recently, shooting with an HDV camera.

The business of interpolation around cuts had slipped past me when I posted. Doesn't this mean that each clip has to be treated separately (cntrl+drag) rather than bulk stretch applied to properties. The usual thing with telecine is to run the film at 16fps (for an 18fps film) to produce a 25fps PAL video without rolling bars etc. I've got a few thousand feet of family 16mm that I've been thinking about. Telecine is much cheaper than scanning, and it sounds like your processor is suggesting scanning. Maybe I should try videoing it at 25fps before passing the job to "FilmPlus".

There are several good threads in this forum covering 8mm movie film transfers.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=477909
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=517243 In this thread you will find links to others.

Ed B

Possibly really stupid question here and one that's been in my head for a long time on this very topic.
24fps can be converted to 60i by using pulldown. Is there some magic set of numbers that lets the same thing be done to go from 18fps to 50i?
As I see it any other method is going to have issues. Either the film runs too fast or resampling has to take place. I realise that the 'magic' numbers might mean that the film is not running at exactly 18fps but I also notice that 8mm was shot at quite a range of frame rates and seems to have been shown at an equally diverse fps, so I guess 10% either way wouldn't be too big an error if it meant it could be seen at 50i.

Hm, come to think of it, might the numbers work better at 60i, almost everything down here can display 60i as well so that could be another option.

Bob.

The early 8mm cameras had a frame rate of ~16fps. It was not for many years before the frame rate was raised to 18fps. All were spring motor driven and some stopped with the shutter open. Projectors typically came with speed control, a variable series resistor. So frame rate was an approximation at best. To project the film at 18fps and get around the limited persistance (~50cps)of the eye, typically projectors blank and show each frame 3 times before advancing to next frame aka pull down. A similair process, fields and frames, was used with early TV to get around the bandwidth limitation. Bottom line I don't remember people worring about variation in frame rate. :)

I transferred many reels of 8mm, super 8mm, and super 8 mm sound, the 8mm dating back to 1939, using Roger Evan's WorkPrinter with extraordinary results. With super 8 sound I transferred the audio and video seperately and then streached (Variable pull down) the video to match the audio in Vegas. If I remember correctly the audio is 12 frames ahead in super 8 sound.

Old Ed

<Edit>
In case you are wondering how I got the video and audio in sync on the super 8 sound I spliced a 1 frame audio tone at the begining and end of each reel. Then I streached the video, using the sound markers, to match the beeps in the audio track and then moved the audio track forward 12 frames.

OK, that's the process I planned to use, other than getting the material telecined at 16fps. FilmPlus can't do double band at 16fps, so I'll be digitizing the audio separately. I've always understood that the change in standard from 16fps to 18fps was introduced by B&H on their 16mm 600 series projectors. The safety shutter was lifted by air pressure from the lamp cooling blower, and there wasn't enough 'blow' at 16 fps. This was certainly correct, but may have been coincidental. Those machines had preset 18 and 24 governors, but I well remember setting speed on my 9.5mm projector according to natural movement on the screen (the machine ran quicker when hot!). I guess some people saw flicker at 16fps with a 3 bladed shutter, but most people don't.

Creating one frame of video from each film frame is not accomplished by scanning, but rather by using a transfer machine that advances the film frames one at a time and captures each as an individual video frame.

There are several technologies for accomplishing this, but for a good discussion of the relative merits of frame accurate transfers vs other methods, check out Roger Evans website at www.moviestuff.tv

It's surprising how much home (silent) 16mm film still exists. Its usage began to decline with the introduction of 8mm in 1932. About 5% of the film I transfer is 16mm, but those who used the format tended to be pretty avid in their filming. It is a wonderful amateur media, with a frame size roughly 4X that of regular 8mm. Frame grabs can be done with pretty good success.

I have recently been using The Video Conversion Experts to convert 8mm to 1080i HDV, m2t files.

They converted the 18(P) FPS to 60i FPS during the capture process to give me the 60i m2t files. It appears to me that this process introduced some kind of artifacts in the video appearing as scan lines or similar. It's a bit of a bummer considering the extremely high cost of these conversions.

So, you are correct in planning your frame rate conversions.

BTW, converting one frame of film to one frame of image is 'scanning', that's how a digital intermediate is created. Where I get confused is the use of the term 'telecine'. This seems to refer to a conversion in real time, either directly to videotape or for live broadcast with on the fly grading.
Today the terms seem to be interchangeable as the one device can do both. Today I watched a film scanner scanning 35mm in real time to SD. At higher res it runs slower, around 1 fps at 2K.
At least one of the older telecines had a "flying spot scanner". A CRT produced a raster that was focussed onto the film and a single photodetector read the density of the film as it was scanned.

And just to confuse us even more another term was "fast pulldown" which had nothing to do with 2:3 pulldown, this referred to how fast each frame was advanced. Pretty notorious for damaging film.

Bob.

Bob,
Maybe we're crossing terms here. While there are some very expensive flying spot scanners being used, other devices such as some of those from Moviestuff advance one frame of film, then "snap" one frame of video from a camera that is focused on the film frame either directly of via a lens/mirror arrangement. Don't know if that would be considered scanning, but I suspect most of those capture are done with the camera set to non-interlaced mode.

"Telecine" seems to be all over the place in usage. I think it's a generic term, but it may also refer to other devices that capture in real time with the transfer machine running at a frame rate set to avoid flicker. For example, 15 or 20 fps in NTSC land. A three bladed shutter is used. These machines are not frame accurate in that blended frames can be captured. To most observers, the frame accurate machine would have a slightly sharper appearance.

Most amateur 8mm film that I see is not very sharp to begin with since the frame is very small, and most people were not too good at setting the distance indicator on the lenses.