Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project
by Bruce Law
on
Sep 20, 2009 at 7:40:19 am
Hi there. I posted this message in the Varicam forum, but there was no response, so was hoping someone might be able to help on this forum.
I'm an editor in the UK and about to start on a docu-drama shot on a mixture of HDCam (for the interviews) and Varicam (for the drama sequences). The reason for using Varicam for the drama shoots was for the higher quality slomos. The show is to be broadcast on UK television - it will be a PAL standard definition edit.
What I had been told about Varicam before the project was that if we always shot either 25fps or 60fps then we would NOT need to use a frame converter to digitise into Avid, as the Panasonic decks handle these 2 frame rates natively - it was just a case of switching the deck into the right mode.
Now, however, after we have shot everything, we are being told that EVERYTHING shot at 60fps will need to be frame converted before being digitised into the Avid. If this is true, it will cost us a lot of money because the post facility charges for frame conversion by the tape and we have shot almost all Varicam footage at 60fps.
I'm trying to get to the bottom of this and wondered if someone here might have experience of Varicam on PAL productions and could tell me what their experience was with this.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Terence Curren on Sep 20, 2009 at 3:41:17 pm
First, kill whoever told you that.
Second, are you sure you understood correctly? The Varicam is ALWAYS recording 60 frames on tape. When you choose your frame rate, it just overrecords the frames. Say you are shooting 30 FPS. Then every frame is recorded twice. On playback, the deck just skips every other frame.
Because of this, folks will often say they are shooting 24 over 60 or some variation of that. Because even though they are shooting 24 FPS, 60 frames are actually recorded on tape. If you misunderstood this statement, then skip my first suggestion.
If they truly shot 60 FPS, and you need to go to 25FPS, you are screwed. It is standards conversion time and there is no cheap way to do it right.
There may still be hope if they didn't actually shoot 60 FPS. But you will only find out when you try to play back the tape.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Bruce Law on Sep 20, 2009 at 4:01:04 pm
Hi Terence and thanks for the response.
I do now, after some research, understand how Varicam works (i.e. recording 60fps but only flagging the frames you require). The reason for shooting the full 60fps was to get high quality slomos. We believed that we would be able to digitise the 60fps material straight into the Avid at 25fps and get 2.5x slomo. Turns out things aren't as easy as that on Avid.
As far as I can work out, on FCP you can indeed ingest 60fps without the need for a FRC (frame converter), as it has a built-in tool to do the conversion job. So I now believe that what I was originally told had FCP in mind and not Avid.
Elsewhere I have been told that MC4 will have the ability to ingest off-speed varicam stuff, but that is no use to us at this point as it is not released for another 2 weeks.
The only other possibility, other than the expensive FRC route, may be to offline on FCP instead. That may not be an option at our post facility - we will find out tomorrow.
Any other suggestions or words of wisdom would be gratefully received....
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Terence Curren on Sep 21, 2009 at 1:41:07 am
I've never actually used this, but there is an external box for the Varicam deck that handles that if slomo was your intention. I believe this is the guy:
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Terence Curren on Sep 21, 2009 at 3:04:49 pm
I saw that on the page I linked to, but I'm not sure if that is true or not. As I said, I have never used this box. Check with Panasonic. Renting that box for your digitizing days wouldn't be too painful.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Bruce Law on Sep 21, 2009 at 8:14:22 pm
In the end things are not as bas as I thought they would be. I met with the post production facility today and this is the upshot:
- They are able to digitise our 60fps material into the Avid at 25fps without any FRC. This is a massive relief to me as I was truly believing that there was no way of getting this stuff into the Avid at all.
- HOWEVER, the 60fps stuff doesn't come in as slomo, but at normal 25fps speed with apparent cadence/pulldown issues, but it is good enough to offline with.
- The plan is to cut the entire film with this material, using motion effects to slow back down (by 240%) the 60fps clips as an approximate of the original slomo footage. Imperfect, but again good enough to offline with.
- When we finish and picture-lock our offline, we will pass all the original 60fps material we have used in the edit through the frame converter and eye-match this in at the online conform stage.
Although the process is less than ideal, it is a huge relief to me that we will not have to frame convert ALL the 60fps stuff, only the stuff we use in the show. Still, it will not be cheap... but not the second-mortgage scenario I was imagining.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Bruce Law on Sep 24, 2009 at 9:15:57 pm
Thanks, Job. We've now tried out MC4... alas to no avail.
We had our post production facility check out the new version 4 of MC. They attempted to digitse footage in at 60fps and play it in a PAL/25fps project. What happened was that all 60fps footage that came into the 25fps project automatically had a timewarp effect applied to it which made it play at a realtime frame rate ('on-speed') with the 60 frames interpolated down into 25fps. No good for us.
What we wanted - and the whole reason we shot at 60fps - was to be able to playback the 60fps stuff as beautiful slomo ('off-speed'). This means a one-to-one/frame-to-frame translation from 60fps to 25fps... i.e. no interpolation, no cadence/pull-down issues, just beautiful (46.6666%) slomo. Seems that Avid just cannot do this.
Apparently - and I have not tried this or seen it with my own eyes, I've only heard it from our facility - you cannot do anything about the way Avid translated the 60fps stuff. It always has this annoying timewarp effect applied when you open it up in a PAL project. Moreover, you cannot apply - even if you so wanted - a motion effect to this timewarped footage. To do so you have to go back to your 60fps project and apply the motion effect there. All that happens when you go back to your 25fps project to play it is that 2 motion effects have been applied to it, making it look absolutely awful.
In our discussions today, another possible workflow became apparent, but I believe the information came too late for us now to be able to take advantage of it....
Apparently we could have digitised everything into a 23.98/720p project. All our 60fps stuff, plus our 25fps HDCam stuff would all have been captured fine into a 23.98 project. All 25fps stuff just comes into 4% faster and the HDCam decks apparently have no issue producing a 24fps timecode or video signal. The only issue would be our 25fps Varicam stuff (as we shot both 25 and 60fps) - no-one knows what would happen to this stuff going into a 23.98 project. Since the 25fps Varicam stuff only forms a small proportion of our rushes, it would probably have been easy enough to get this stuff frame converted.
We had one other suggested workflow, although this information also came a few days too late...
Apparently you can digitise 60fps Varicam into FCP just fine. Then you bounce the footage over to Cinematools and tell it to flag the material as 25fps. Then you can play it all just fine - as beautiful 46.6666% slomo - in a 25fps timeline. Funny how this valuable information always seems to come just a little too far down the wrong pathway!
Anyway, if I discover any more info that might help anyone else in a similar scenario, I'll be sure to update here. One consolation is that the 60fps Varicam stuff looks absolutely stunning when you can get it to playback at its intended frame rate.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Terence Curren on Sep 24, 2009 at 9:53:31 pm
As long as you have V4...
Set up a 60P project. Capture your footage. Go to your 25P project. Open the bins with footage from your 60P project. Cut that into your timeline. It will apply a motion effect to adjust the speed. Just delete the effect.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Bruce Law on Sep 24, 2009 at 10:50:35 pm
Hi Terence,
Are you sure you're able to do this? We were told by our post facility (as per my posting) that removing the effect was impossible??? If that's not the case, our problem would be solved.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Terence Curren on Sep 24, 2009 at 11:14:33 pm
Just tried it and you are correct. Thought it would work if the effect was promoted and then removed, but no dice.
The painful option, which you might want to wait until the offline is finished for, would be to send out a QT reference of the clips from the 60 project, then import that into the 25P project.
Make sure to change the console command that allows the QT to come in frame for frame.
"ignoreqtrate" is a toggle command. When it toggles to "true" then it will ignore the incoming rate and bring it in frame for frame.
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Bruce Law on Sep 25, 2009 at 6:55:27 am
Thanks for trying that out. Elsewhere it has been suggested that the motion effect could be promoted to timewarp and adjusted to 100%. Were you able to promote the motion effect at all?
Re: Digitising Varicam 25fps / 60fps into PAL project by Bruce Law on Sep 25, 2009 at 7:46:08 pm
The engineer at our post facility got a chance to test out the promote-and-adjust-to-100% method late this evening. He has tentatively told me that it seems to work. This is fantastic news, but we are still holding our horses for a while just in case there are any other complications or implications we haven't discovered yet.
