Yep. I should have included more about the mpeg render. It looks great. You can see the difference in the stills in terms of the blended fields, and of course in the stream you can see a more 'dream like' or surreal cadence. Rendering this to DVD looks great, and unless you have a Panny DX100, you can't print it to tape anyway.
One kind of interesting thing is to take it back to 29.97 after you've done all the editing, filtering, overlays, compositing at 24P. It doesn't look quite like you'd expect it to. Some folks might like it, others won't.
Either way, to preview externally or to print to tape, it either has to have the 3:2 inserted, or you have to have a cam that can accept a 24P signal.

Isn't inverse telecine the process of removing pulldown not adding it?


"Vegas is capable of working with 24p natively, inserting what's known as 3:2 pulldown during playback. This is referred to as "inverse telecine." "

Another question. What is the best process of converting 29.97 to 24p. I've tried rendering a 29.97 video as 24p and it looked horrible. Any speculation or further advice ?

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

I'm an idiot, I'll try the next part of the tutorial that appears to answer the question I just asked.

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

Thanks Spot ! A very interesting read.

SPOT,
as far as I'm aware you cannot PTT at 24 or 25 fps to anything including the DVX100. You can convert your footage to say 60i with 2:3:3:2 pulldown and print that to anything although some VCRs it would seem loose the header info meaning that you may have some extra work to do if you want to do a correct ITC in Vegas.

Same thing applies to how it shoots footage, it still records interlaced fields to tape, the difference is the temporal relationship between those fields.

Alright, having now read the entire thing before jumping in with questions, I have another.

I theory couldnt you render out your entire project at 29.97, start a new project with just the avi you rendered and than export it as 24p with the same results ? I ask cuz this seems like it would be a little easier workflow, at least for me. Great Tutorial.

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

Basically inverse telecine IVTC as it is also called, brings back movie's original framerate from NTSC's 29.97fps to 24fps. Vegas inserts the frames back in so it can be seen on an external monitor. Maybe that's sort of a clumsy way of wording it?

Hi Spot,

This is very interesting, and I look forward to experimenting with it.

Only typo I found was several uses of "it's" ("it is") when you meant "its". At the risk of being pedantic, "its" meaning "belonging to it" has no apostrophe, just like "his" meaning "belonging to him."

I really appreciate the time you spend posting your expert advice to the group! Thanks!

Jeremy

Thanks SPOT. Your Tute has explained some more detail I needed illumination on. Even if I don't carry out the "steps", you have now filled in some more gaps in my video KB.

Grazie

Just got back to this. Thanks for the response Spot. Will have to experiment with this one especially for the theatre work I do. Curious to see how it will look under stage lighting.

Thanks again,
John

Spot, you may want to change the line that says

"Shooting through pantyhose"

street cred and all that :-)

Regards, Chester

PS. Please read this post with a deep voice.

SPOT,
your the guy that wrote a book on Vegas right ?
How would the vid-age look if you used (your idea) the doubled up track and one set to upper field and the other to lower field ? Say, by right clicking the tracks and setting upper and lower, and then by having progressive set on the project property.
Would this take longer to render ?

Also your tute does not mention the pulldown method for 50i PAL.
I have not look to see if it is in online help, but is is pretty simple ?

I'll attempt to answer the earlier response of the ilk: "what do I do for PAL again?":

PAL doesn't have a pulldown. The worst you'll see is only possible if 24p/film has been improperly taken to an intermediate of NTSC29.97 VTC. Then, NTSC to PAL will tend not to show the pulldown itself but a beating/temporal artifact might be noticable on some clips, to the discerning eye. Depends on the method ie whether IVTC occurs before reaching the PAL version.

PAL frame sized 24p is possible if you want but is best rendered with a slowdown of the original speed by 4% and a pitch conversion up scale by 4%. Much better than scaling up or running a crop off a 24p NTSC restored from whatever tape format this lives at.

If the target is NTSC by player IVTC, then a 720x480 version (scale or crop at tail end of processing) of the 576 would be the main missing element on the tutorial.

PAL 25p from a 50i source with a film gamma, glow and grain (with all the other good advice from Spot), would be the main topics. Generally speaking pulldown is an NTSC compromise albeit that for those brought up on it, there is an extra dream feature to appreciate from it.

"True 24/25p" will still hit some of the anti-flicker (inter-line) and resolution "enhancers" of the CCDs. These elements add at least some of the adjacent lines information to the output. This in "frame mode" should be turned off but I suspect it rarely can be. Those CCD engineers just can't help themselves from making video difficult to be filmic. This does suit interleaved filming but is likely to be too deep in the CCD sensor to be selectable. You may like to check this sort of detail out before shelling out on an $8k 24/25p camera. Adding to Spots guide on actually living with 50i/60i modes. Progressive isn't a waste of money though, just maybe oversold as a general purpose mode where filmic video is the target.

The tutorial has stirred up some good interest I think.

Perhaps the how-to should be for PAL and for NTSC sources with an ability to read it if crossing over with the target formats. The PAL thoughts were my reason to post. The tutorial itself isn't in question.

50p and 60p 16:9 cameras will help with the post options.
150p for slowmo.

All in good time. With the New Year coming for all us Gregorian followers, I thought it appropriate to throw that last para. in.

I'm sure that even doing a few video test runs in various conditions is a lot simpler than operating and processing film. Just in terms of the other terminology involved (colourists, stock etc).

I'm curious about Muttley's first question...as I'm at work without some of my XL1s footage to test Spot's setup..guess I maybe missing something but I too have wondered why we couldn't render a completed project to 29fps uncompressed and then use the avi for a 24p version.....

One thing puzzles me. The tutorial says, "First, edit your media on the timeline as individual events and cuts-only. Do not do any transitions, titles, FX at this time. Render these individual clips out by double clicking the event to select the event as its own region."

But transitions take extra frames from the adjoining clips to do their thing, and those frames won't be rendered into 24p if the project is edited with cuts only. Where do the extra frames come from?

If you have two clips that you wish to apply a transition to then they have to overlap by the duration of the transition. In other words if you have 2 10 second clips and you create a 2 second transition the length of the combined clips will be 18 seconds.
So if you take the two 10 second clips, convert them to 24p you still have 2 10 second clips. Overlap them 2 seconds on the timeline so you can apply transition and you'll again get a total of 18 seconds of video.
The point of not applying them prior to IVTC is so the FXs are calculated at 24p.

Umm. So you're saying, edit with transitions (overlapping events), then take the events apart for rendering? That makes sense to me, but that's not what the tutorial suggests.

NO,
don't worry about the transitions!

Just chop the video up into clips. Convert clips and render out. Bring new clips (now 24p) into TL of new 24p project and apply transitions or whatever to your hearts content.

What youre trying to avoid is applying th transitions to the footage prior to pulldown removal,

Jeremyk, farss is explaining it correctly. By "edit" I'm talking about CUTTING the events to desired length, I recommend leaving some head/tail on the event for transitions or just shifting around. Anyway, you don't want any transitions, titles, nothing in there other than the media itself, so that all FX, titles, generated media are created at 24p.

Geeez!!!!


Great tutorial Spot,, interesting stuff for DVD output. Always amazing what can be done inside this little edit program. Magic Bullet takes forever and frankly looks are pretty close.
Enjoy Sundance,, wish we could go this year buttoo much $$$$$$ being spent on other goodies , but we will be there in 2005.

So when you went to DVD at the very end, you had to render to MPG-2.

What template did you choose? Was it DVD Architect 24p or DVD Architect NTSC (29.97)?

Will a regular north american DVD player play the former?

When you buy a DVD at the store, what format are they normally at? I thought they were all converted to 29.97 but that would ruin the telecine wouldn't it?