Re: 24 to 29.97 to color to 29.97?

Pulldown is actually the speed being "pulled down". Its what happens when you shoot film, and I mean the celluloid kind, at 24.000, and telecine it at 23.976 to video, whether you record it natively to an HD format or... and this is where the confusion lies... with 2:3 cadence to 29.97. The inserted 2:3 field cadence is now referred to in the vernacular as "pulldown", but what is being "pulled down"? The speed. Even Panasonic refers to their 2:3:3:2 cadence approach as "Advanced Pulldown", so even the people who should know better are adding to the confusion. What's worse with them is the 59.94 timebase.

The issue at hand though is that COLOR takes things at face value. When you drop anything onto a timebase, whether it was 23.98, 29.97, 25, 59.94... whatever, it gets processed at whatever timebase COLOR gets handed in the XML. Compounding this, its not particularly sophisticated in the way it counts... that is, it does acknowledge the IN timecode of a clip (hurray!), but after that, it counts like this: another frame, another frame, another frame. Because at its core, COLOR is a sequential image process, and treats frame rate as if it were just a number in the header of a dpx or TIFF file. This is why the Long-GOP formats were such a disaster and unsupported for a long time.

Editing 23.98 in a 29.97 sequence is not even recommended by Final Cut. The "open sequence" is a joke. Try dropping a 23.98 sequence into a 29.97 timeline sometime.
No, the best approach still is to keep things as native as possible -- really the numbers are not different over a :30 duration spot, so all this frame translation is utterly worthless and troublesome.

At least you aren't trying to go the other way, dropping 29.97 into a 23.98 --- now that is the definition of ugly. Even uglier though is trying to edit previously cadenced material in another timeline. What circumstance is this? Editing "2:3 over 60" source media on a 29.97 timeline. What do you think the odds are of keeping the "pulldown" coherent?

Nil.

jPo






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