Tim Wilson: The Wisdom of the COW: Part 2: ProRes for HDV, with a splash of Color

24P HDV and ProRes

There are all kinds of questions about 24-frame workflows all over The COW. Even though it's hardly unanimous, Bob Zelin's advice remains our favorite. Or at least the one we keep reading in amazement.

NEVER work in 23.98 ever again. You are in the television business, and like everyone else, you must deal with 29.97 footage. It's a fact of life. Your DVCPRO HD VTR can output your 23.98 material at 59.94 (a normal frame rate for standard def upconverts). Had you done this (done your job at 59.94, and not 23.98), you would have had ZERO problems. But now, you will be in render hell (or you will recapture your entire project).

Make believe 23.98 doesn't even exist (unless you are the DP). Learn how to set all Sony and Panasonic VTRs to do the 2:3 pulldown, so you can always capture at 59.94.

Now, yes, sometimes you're doing a film out, and you need 24. Here's a great question from Hooban on his very first post: Welcome to The COW, Hooban!

As many of you know, when shooting the 24p HDV footage on the V1U, the footage lands on a 29.97fps tape. Great, so I'll just do a reverse telecine on that footage with Cinetools and get it back to true 24p, right? No, because HDV uses temporal frames and Cinetools won't do a reverse telecine on native HDV.

So editing HDV is out of the question unless I want to bring it in with the Apple Intermediate Codec. I don't like that because the batch capture doesn't work with AIC, it's just a straight capture. I've also heard mixed things about the quality of that codec. o that's likely not my best option.

A friend recommended I get a video card that allows me to capture DVCProHD. Once capturing using the DVCProHD codec, I then run it through Cinetools for a reverse telecine, and then I'm editing true 24p. This seems like a pretty decent option, but am I right in that I will still need to do a reverse telecine on the DVCProHD footage? Or can I capture it directly as 24p thus reversing it on the fly?

But wait, before I do that, FCP now has the exciting new ProRes 422

Here's a fantastic example of why we're doing this "COW's Collected Wisdom." The most complete answer to Hooban's question was in a different forum, on a thread he hadn't posted on. Here's Mike Most:

Apple has made it pretty easy to transcode to ProRes AND convert to 24p in one step by including "smart" reverse telecine in Compressor 3.

Make a droplet to contain the settings for ProRes, 1920x1080, 23.98 with reverse telecine applied. You can ingest all of your 24 in 60i material as native HDV, drop all of the clips on the droplet, and go away for a few minutes (the new version of Compressor is pretty darned quick, especially with a quad-or-more-core machine and distributed processing).

Import the resulting files and start cutting in ProRes, 24p.

Unlike the reverse telecine function in Cinema Tools, the reverse telecine in Compressor is "smart," and figures out the cadence on its own, adjusting shot by shot. I've run at least 20 shots through it in the way I just described, and the pulldown was perfectly removed on all of them.

Of course, these workflows only work if you're not using an offline/online path, because time code from your original source tape becomes useless.

(Bessie added the emphasis there. She cares very, very much about timecode.)

Jerry Hoffman has the last word: I'm not sure that removing the pulldown is absolutely necessary. You'd need an SDI output to capture with a Kona 2, but a Kona LH card would capture the analog component from your camera/deck, and change it to ProRes.

Actually, Zelin has the last word: unless you absolutely have to use 24: don't. There are better ways to get a film look. There are even better ways to look like you shot on 24.

But if you need to work with both 24 and 29.97, you can do it in either software or hardware using the suggestions above.