Hello All,

I am starting to film our first 24p film that I am going to cut in Liquid 6.1 - 7.1 Filming with 2 Sony Z1 cameras at 1080i 50-29.97  Camera Cranes and GlideCams

My current workflow while in the post script film phase is going to be taking my raw source file (1440 x 1080 or 1920 x 1080) and convert it from 29.97 to 24fps & reduced to 720 x 480 using Magic Bullet & Adobe After Effects 7. This is great to get that film look and feel with the tools that Magic Bullet provides. So taking this footage and audio that is converted to 24fps 720 x 480 and importing to Liquid I am ready to edit & produce. Does anyone have any input on thier workflow if doing this process? Codecs? Exports? Rendering? Programs? Would I be better off capturing my raw HD footage through another program other than liquid before sending off to Magic Bullet for the conversion? Eazier or Faster ways of doing this?

So far I am really liking what I am producing, I am looking for advice on workflows, do's and don'ts and general input if anyone is playing around with this process.

 I am going to produce a two year project that is privatly funded and going to use many programs for this production including: Autodesk Combustion4, Lots of Boris Red4, this best plugin for Liquid IMHO:) and of course Photoshop and Blender, including many others.

Thanks to all for any input.

 Cheers!

Why don't you stay at HDV?

I am doing something similar (no cranes and glides unfortunatelly) and I am going all the way HDV.

In fact I did up sized the DV to HDV. HDV is so much better. 

P.S. This is not an advice as for what to do in no way, I am just projecting to you my thoughts. 

I would avoid 24p. Liquid does not handle it well except with specific cameras (JVC ProHD and Canon F modes). Most other forms of 24p are not supported in Liquid.

Have to disagree here, Lew. Liquid works quite well with 24p, it just doesn't capture and write to/from cameras all that well. The case at hand, 24p is simulated after-the-fact in AE w/ Magic Bullet so, provided the output from AE is compatible with Liquid, things should be fine.

I would say the biggest problem is likely the massive computer resources for a project like this. You'll likely want to convert your raw footage to 24p in AE and then render this out to an uncompressed AVI - well this will really eat disk space. You could go out MJPEG instead of uncompressed and save yourself some disk space, but in the end, the result won't be as good.

I assume you're going out of AE at 480p24? Then you intend to work on an uncompressed timeline in Liquid (a timeline set to NTSC 16x9 with interlacing set to none and the framerate set to 23.98 - which is really 23.976)?

You really have to spend a week or more playing with this to get a feeling for disk capacity and workflow. If it were me, I'd like to keep it all in HD resolutions until you're ready to go to - DVD?

There have been many posts on this subject (mine included - I use DVFilmMaker) but there is no single answer to your original question. You may want to keep this thread alive by reporting back with your findings as you go along. We'd all be interested to hear your progress.

One last thing - Magic Bullet is a suite of technologies. Only one of which is the conversion to 24p. I'm not sure you'd be well served doing the color and grain stuff at the frontend of your project. 24p conversion - yes, but mucking with the color, etc. may be something you should leave until the end. Having said that - your disk drive requirements just jumped again, didn't they?

So you would be suggesting to produce in HDV 29.97, Then Convert my final product to 24p, using DVFilmmaker, Magicbullet, Ect...? I read that when working in 24p, its best to have your source already 24p and edit in 24p for smoother slows and other good reasons. Is there that big of a difference to edit in 24P? I have used Magicbullet to convert some UncompressedAVI's to 24p. Used the Squeeze to add my flags during M2V Rendering and I was not that impressed with my results.   ??

 My goal here is to get a true 'Film' look that I can put up on the big screen here at our local theater, True 24p. Doing this using Liquid as my NLE of course with many other tools when my footage is all 1080 HDV. Also diskspace is not a problem. Running a 1.5TB MediaServer :) I want to keep everything HDV untill DVD or Big Screen or the highest res possible, disk space and time are not factors, just the best quailty I can squeze out of the process.

With the Z1 I would highly suggest shooting either 25 Cineframe or 50i.  25 Cineframe will give you a 25p out of the box look.  25p is almost exactly the same as 24p but you have the advantge of not having to deal with 3:2 pulldown or a long conversion process.  It takes a long time to convert 60i to 24p if you want it to look good.  25 Cineframe of course just dumps a field so the level of detail is less but it is still higher then 25p from a SD source.  If you want higher resolution shoot 50i and use a good software tool to convert the 50i to 25p.

 Avoid 24 Cineframe at all costs because it is a messed up form of 24p that uses a very quick and dirty method of blending fields.

In Liquid I usually edit 25p or 50i as 50i in order for everything to be RT.  I use one of my HDTV's as a output monitor for the BOB or Chrome Xe and run everything in Pal mode.  Yes my NTSC HDTV displays 25p and 50i material perfectly.

It should be noted that Clint Eastwood used a bunch of SONY Z1 cameras for one of his latest war movies.  I forget the name of it but they were used in a scene where a bunch of solders stormed a beach and every extra carried a Z1 crammed inside a gun box or something like that.  During editing they processed the footage which was shot at 50i to make it look like 25p material.  So if it worked for them I'm sure this workflow could work for you as well.

 Once you are finished editing your 25p or 50i project you can export as a image sequence and reimport as 23.976 (or 23.98 in Liquid terms,  it just rounds the display number so don't worry)  You then need to time stretch or piutch shift the audio track by 4% to match the new framerate.  You can also use a third party tool to run this entire video and audio conversion process.  By working this way your video never looses any quality and only your audio track will change either time compressed or pitch shifted.  Once you have your 24p version you can export and create a 24p DVD (do you do this in Liquid, Liquid doesn't support 24p pulldown flags for DVD authoring) or use some third party tool to add a 3:2 pulldown to record your 24p production to tape as telecined 60i.

The Z1 is nice because it does give NTSC users the option to shoot 25 Cineframe or 50i which works out much better for film based editing in Liquid.

Smetivd, Thank you for your Great response. This was the information I was looking for. If I have any other questions is a PM ok?

Steve, Thanks also, your always a great help

I agree with Tom - nice thing about the Z1 is the ability to shoot in 50i which converts readily to 25p using DVFIimMaker or even straight into Liquid, I suppose.

I think you may have misunderstood my earlier post. I should have been clearer. I am suggesting if you work with 24p to do the conversion to 24p before you edit your project, but leave the color correction and grain, etc. for afterwards. In other words, don't use Magic Bullet looks prior to editing, just Magic Bullet Frames (if you're in the Magic Bullet world).

Red Giant does a pretty good job of describing the editing process to get the best out of DV -> Film look, but I believe they go a bit overboard in some areas.

Anyway, try Tom's approach of using 25p and just speed it up in Liquid by 4% to match the 24p playback time, etc. (Tom described it better than I).

Good luck!

One question, when taking the 50i to convert to 25p what should I use to do this converstion, or do I just import in AL under PAL 25p? Do I get any lossness this way? or is it better to convert to 25p using third party?

Cheers

 

I just reailzed that I am also using FX1's along with my Z1s so I have to shoot 60i. I am having a hard time figuring out my timeline properites for 23.98fps. I have some converted clips that were 60i and now 24p via the 'Bullet' and in my timeline properites is wont let me change my framerate to 23.98? So even when I turn my interlacing to none, it still shows the frame rate at 29.97. Where am I going wrong in Liquid?  Steve- When you say export out of AE/Magicbullet at 480/24 what do you mean? Also when I import my Bulleted clips the properites show a framerate of 23.98 but its still says its interlaced? I guess when I even get my 24p clips I cant see them progressive at the film frame in Liquid.

 

Thanks for all your help!

A Liquid sequence cannot change the framerate after the fact.  The framerate can only be set when you first create a sequence.  Create a new sequence and select 23.98 and make sure fields are set to non interlaced.

Perfect. Just the info I was needing as usual. Thanks so much!

PostPro Junkie:

Steve- When you say export out of AE/Magicbullet at 480/24 what do you mean? Also when I import my Bulleted clips the properites show a framerate of 23.98 but its still says its interlaced? I guess when I even get my 24p clips I cant see them progressive at the film frame in Liquid.

I usually work with HDV and convert this to 1080p24 (which is short for 1080p @23.976 fps). In your case, if you want to work with SD then your output from AE would be 480p @23.976 fps or 480p24 for short.

In AE your composition would be set to 23.976 fps, no interlacing with a frame size of 720x480 with pixel aspect ratio of 1.2 (for widesceen) or 0.9 for 4x3.

If you render this to uncompressed or MJPEG, it is likely that when you import it into Liquid, Liquid will mistake this for interlaced video. Here's what I do:

1. Import your 480p24 footage created in AE - I use the Link option for import - I really don't want Liquid copying this.

2. Check the properties of this clip in Liquid. Liquid will tell you it's 23.98 fps / interlaced.

3. Change the properties of the imported clip to non-interlaced.

4. Create a timeline based on NTSC wide-screen (I believe that's what you're using?). Don't accept the new timeline sequence just yet - we'll change a few things in the properties before we give the 'OK'

5. Change the framerate to 23.98

6. Change the interlacing to non-interlaced

7. Notice that the render codec changes from DV AVI to uncompressed. This is because the DV codec doesn't support 24p so you'll be exporting is some other format (such as uncompressed or MPEG-2). You're pretty much restricted to uncompressed if you're eventually going to DVD because Liquid does not allow for the 3:2 pulldown flag in 24p MPEG-2 - you'll need another authoring package for that (TmpGEnc XPress 4 comes to mind).

8. Drop the clip you imported from AE into this new sequence. The slice should remain gray.

9. Edit this and play with it a bit (razor it, etc.). Add some transitions and such.

10. When it's time to export from Liquid, use AVI uncrompressed or you could fuse if you left the render/fuse as uncompressed. Note that the fuse results in a 24-bit AVI while the export is 32-bit (or is it the other way around?). Anyway, for one of the two, the extra 8 bits is for the alpha channel, but Liquid doesn't really support it correctly (well, sort of) so it's wasted disk space.

To go to DVD with TmpGEnc Xpress 4, I drop the exported uncompressed AVI into TmpGEnc, paired with the audio file of the same name (note that sometimes you have to export you audio in a separate export operation (AVI-WAV export) - depends - for you, probably not. Anyway, TmpGEnc will recognize this as progressive footage (you might have to manually set the aspect ratio - sometimes Liquid gets it wrong). When creating the MPEG-2 files for DVD, TmpGEnc will automatically select the 3:2 pulldown option that puts a flag in the 29.97 fps stream (NTSC DVDs always required 29.97 fps) to tell the player that it can remove the 3:2 pulldown and playback the content at 23.976 fps...

Hope this helps somewhat explain what I do. Please note that I get far better results keeping this whole operation in 1080p and let TmpGEnc down-scale to SD. Your milage may vary...

Good luck!

Steve- This was exactly the workflow information I was looking for. You did a great job explaining. I think that I am going to use 1080p alll the way then let TmpGEnc scale down my footee before converting to m2v for DVD. Then I have a high res file for the big screen.

Tom, same to you.

Thanks again to both of you for helping me so so much. I will post some of my very funny indepentant movie when I get that far.

I'm interested in hearing more about how you will project the final production.

One thought is to play directly from your laptop to a digital projector.  In that case, you may have more options and less conversions and potentially better resolution.  With the right projector, you can project HD from your laptop.

I'm a big fan of "film look" so am interested in the various techniques you use.  I actually found on one project that 30p from 60i looked more film-like than 24p from 60i (at least the way I was getting 24p, which probably wasn't the best).  My 24P video looked more stuttery than a typical film viewed on TV, whereas my 30p resembled it more.  The reason I mention it is you might want to see if 30p gives you a satisfactory film look, since the workflow is so much more straightforward.  But if you plan to print to film, you'll definitely want 24 fps.

I agree that shooting 50i would be the best way to get 24p if only you had that option.

Thanks to all who shared their detailed procedures for getting 24p -- very valuable.

Smetvid:

With the Z1 I would highly suggest shooting either 25 Cineframe or 50i.  25 Cineframe will give you a 25p out of the box look.  25p is almost exactly the same as 24p but you have the advantge of not having to deal with 3:2 pulldown or a long conversion process.  It takes a long time to convert 60i to 24p if you want it to look good.  25 Cineframe of course just dumps a field so the level of detail is less but it is still higher then 25p from a SD source.  If you want higher resolution shoot 50i and use a good software tool to convert the 50i to 25p.

 Avoid 24 Cineframe at all costs because it is a messed up form of 24p that uses a very quick and dirty method of blending fields.

In Liquid I usually edit 25p or 50i as 50i in order for everything to be RT.  I use one of my HDTV's as a output monitor for the BOB or Chrome Xe and run everything in Pal mode.  Yes my NTSC HDTV displays 25p and 50i material perfectly.

It should be noted that Clint Eastwood used a bunch of SONY Z1 cameras for one of his latest war movies.  I forget the name of it but they were used in a scene where a bunch of solders stormed a beach and every extra carried a Z1 crammed inside a gun box or something like that.  During editing they processed the footage which was shot at 50i to make it look like 25p material.  So if it worked for them I'm sure this workflow could work for you as well.

 Once you are finished editing your 25p or 50i project you can export as a image sequence and reimport as 23.976 (or 23.98 in Liquid terms,  it just rounds the display number so don't worry)  You then need to time stretch or piutch shift the audio track by 4% to match the new framerate.  You can also use a third party tool to run this entire video and audio conversion process.  By working this way your video never looses any quality and only your audio track will change either time compressed or pitch shifted.  Once you have your 24p version you can export and create a 24p DVD (do you do this in Liquid, Liquid doesn't support 24p pulldown flags for DVD authoring) or use some third party tool to add a 3:2 pulldown to record your 24p production to tape as telecined 60i.

The Z1 is nice because it does give NTSC users the option to shoot 25 Cineframe or 50i which works out much better for film based editing in Liquid.

 Hi Smetvid:

You then need to time stretch or piutch shift the audio track by 4% to match the new framerate. 

What is the best way to precisely pitch-shift the audio track so it matches the imported video clip exactly (no lip-sync problems)?

Also, is there a way to do this without exporting an image sequence (which I assume is huge for long productions)?  Some other format possibly?

Regards,

-SB