Re: from 1080i 29.97fps to 1080p 25fps

[Spyros Skandalos] "My 5hours footage shot with a Sony hdv Fx1 1080i 29.97fps.
I want to get a smoother look and decided to edit in a 25fps timeline (fcpx)."


When a producer signs a delivery contract with a broadcaster, one of the items in every document I have ever seen is a clause either prohibiting the use of HDV or limiting its use to a pre-agreed, extremely small percentage of the finished property. Why? Because HDV is just a terrible format, for one. Terrible for broadcast because it is the #1 early Long-GOP format. It has the same bitrate as SD Digital Betacam. It is low-bandwidth because it has a highly compressed, 8-bit, 4:2:0 encoding scheme. Is any of this important? Only to people who need to do more with their footage than shoot it, edit it, bake out a Quicktime, and that's it.

Also, broadcasters tend to like their delivered shows to have been shot in the same frame rate as the deliverable: although 23.98 --> 25 and 23.98 -->29.97 are allowed, since it is rare for film-based productions to have been shot at the native broadcast film rate and so pulldown schemes were invented to accommodate that.

Enter HDV, that can only record at video rates, rather than film rates. It would have been so much easier for you to simply shoot at 25.

I'm surprised that FCP has not been a bigger obstacle with this framerate disparity, and it didn't discourage you at the outset.

In the end, though, finish your edit. Send it to Compressor, set either for "Better" or "Best" motion/ frame rate conversion and be prepared to wait for either a very long time, or an extremely, like unimagineably, long time.


jPo

"I always pass on free advice -- its never of any use to me" Oscar Wilde.