Re: Panasonic's 720p 23.98 -

Gary, I work with Aaron who posted the original question. I was the one who told him to jump on the cow and see if he can get any info. For you to respond to his question with "Duh.", is really quite lame. He had a very relevant question... "Duh" might be appropriate if someone asked if FCP can work on a Mac, and you were a 12 year old responding.

So to simplify his question and clarify some of your "answers":

We work a lot with clients who shoot DVCProHD 23.98. Typically these jobs are cut in FCP, with final delivery for digital signage, web, or projection at 23.98 (ie. we need to deliver a DVCProHD or P-JPEG QT 23.98 progressive). Sometimes these jobs need serious color correction and finishing, and we would like to do this CC in smoke. We have not found any solution to roundtrip footage out of a FCP 720p 23.98 timeline and into the smoke, then back into a QT on the Mac.

The reason for this problem is due to the fact that as Aaron pointed out the 720 spec only allows for 60fps or 59.94fps. When we are working D1 or 1080, we typically send shots back and forth from Mac to Smoke or Avid via Decklink SDI or HDSDI with crash captures. 720 23.08 doesn't allow us to do this... when it plays out to the HDSDI it replicates the frames to get back to the standard 59.94fps spec. If we capture this into a Smoke 720p project, we end up with the redundant frames. We have ways around this in smoke, but the problem is then how do we get back to the Mac 24p. Since smoke is running 59.94, we need to capture this material back into a 59.94 FCP setup, not a 23.98 setup. And since it lost all the metadata when it went over to the smoke, the frame-rate convertor will not work to throw away the redundant frames. You mentioned Cinema Tools, but from our tests it did not help. Please explain how you would do this...

We recently upgraded to the current version of smoke (2007) which supposedly had better Varicam support, but as I suspected it still is relying on the metadata. We figured that the only way to preserve the metadata was to lay off the sequence from FCP to a DVCProHD deck then capture it back into the smoke. This did not work. We are running the latest versions of both FCP and Smoke. You said that FCP can output the metadata if the deck if everything is setup correctly. We do not see any options for this in the manual. What exactly are we looking for?

If there is no solution we will write our own DVCPro Frame Rate Convertor which will analyze the clip rather than using the metadata.

-Matt Silverman
Creative Director
Phoenix Editorial | Designs
San Francisco