Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Fortunately/Unfortunately

Fortunately, Red Giant's BulletProof looks like a nice solution to our problems ingesting footage from the unhacked GH1 into Final Cut Pro.
Unfortunately, BulletProof is not actually compatible with Panasonic cameras.
Fortunately, Adobe Premiere will, as pointed out by Kangas in the comments below, work with Panasonic's .mts files.
Unfortunately, Premiere will not read and interpret those .mts files shot at 23.98 but in a 29.97 container properly.

Fortunately, the most recent version of JES Deinterlacer will read .mts files, reverse-telecine them, and create ProRes Quicktimes which can be read by Final Cut directly.
Unfortunately those same files don't seem to be readable by Premiere.
Fortunately there is a thing called Adobe Media Encoder.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like Adobe Media Encoder naturally does reverse telecine.

So... right now it looks like the JES Deinterlacer and Final Cut Pro. Unless it's the JES Deinterlacer and Premiere. I don't know. I'm sticking to FCP just because it's "the devil you know". But... I dunno.

9 comments:

Kangas said...

I don't understand what you mean. You import the files(which have been shot at 23.98?) and it plays them at 29.97? Did you try to use the Interpret function to make them the speed they're supposed to be? Did you make sure your sequence had the correct settings? I haven't had a problem importing anything from my t2i or the Gopro--had to interpret the gopro footage to get the slow mo that I shot, but no actual problems.

Andrew Bellware said...

We're shooting 23.97 but in 29.97i. So the "cadence" has to be interpreted and the extra fields have to be stripped out and such. So yeah, it's a bit of a pain.
Fortunately, the GH1 can be hacked to shoot natively in 23.98p.
Unfortunately, this causes an intermittent error which causes the GH1 to stop recording when you have a locked shot with a lot of detail.

Jeff said...

Fortunately, that's my favorite short-form storytelling game.

Unfortunately, I haven't clue one what in fuck-all you're talking about.

Andrew Bellware said...

For you, Jeff, the pretty picture of Apollo 15.

Aric Blue said...

I mean I guess the question is WHAT? How can you shoot in 24fps but in 30fps?(rounded for ease) I guess you're saying it's recorded in 30fps but you're telling the camera you're shooting 24?

I assume there's a reason you don't just shoot 24fps? I dunno, that sounds like a bizarre way to do stuff. And yeah, not sure what Premiere would do with that.

Andrew Bellware said...

It's the 2:3:2 pulldown thing. So the 24p (or 23.98p) is encoded into 59.97 interlaced fields. But the progressive frames can be extracted from the interlaced video. Like the old DVX100's used to do.
The GH1 hack is totally awesome BUT... it makes the camera shut down.
I'm just waiting for the Black Magic 4K camera... Then we'll just shoot in ProRes directly.

Kangas said...

Ah. Yeah, I remember the DVX thing. Man, that sounds pretty stupid in today's day and age. And yeah, I hope the Blackmagic cameras are all they're being talked up to be.

Lindsay Stewart said...

I had a client bring me files in .mts format. I ended up buying a little utility called wondershare video converter that took care of them without a hitch, $30 or there abouts.

Andrew Bellware said...

JES deinterlacer works great. And it deals with the 29/23 (30/24) issue of the pull down. Converting them to a usable format (which Premiere just does all by itself) is fairly simple. Getting the dang frame rate correct is a bigger bit o' trouble.