.MOV importing at wrong fps

[Kawika Ohumukini]

When I import .mov files from my ContourHD 1080p into Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects CS5.5, the fps comes out to 59.96. Opening the file in Quicktime or any other program it says the file is 59.94 fps which is per the spec of the Contour cameras.

Premiere can deal with it but AE spits out a 17:18 error and won't deal with the file until I reinterpret the clip which of course drops frames. That's not good because it's noticeable over a 3 hour video. Besides doing that in PP isn't right because linking to AE works on the file directly, not the sequence or the reinterpreted file, so I end up having to convert the file externally (I use Avidemux) which may or may not be losing quality, not sure. Either way I don't want to do that.

The guys over at Contour don't know why it's happening.

I've seen similar discussions about files importing at the wrong frame rate but none seem exactly the same and don't seem to have good solutions.

My thought is the files are correct and it's Adobe but I'm not sure.

Does anyone know if there's a .mov tool to verify a file matches the QT spec?

Does anyone have experience with this and have a better solution than Interpret or external program?

Thanks for any help.

[Battle Vaughan]

VLC media player (VideoLAN - Official page for VLC media player, the Open Source video framework!) (freeware) gives a readout to 6 decimal places (tools>media info>codec details) of a clip framerate although it does not specifically state anything about qt conformity. QT player in the inspector panel also gives quicktime information....exept for interpreting your footage as the necessary frame rate (which you indicated was not a good solution) I can't offer a specific fix....

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Thanks for the tip on VLC precision. I've been digging around with Apple Dumpster Atom viewer and best I can tell is it's a rounding issue with Adobe. The fix for now is to run the clips through Avidemux in copy mode. Cheers

[Kevin Monahan]

Can you send me a sample? I'll send you a PM with my email.

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Hi Kevin,

Here's a file that's right out of the ContourHD 1080p camera. If you do, thanks for taking a look.

I'm not going to pretend that I know what I'm talking about, but, when I look at the MOV file in Dumpster what I get is below (see DATA). Technical stuff to follow.

If fps = timeScale / Media Time, then 90000/1502=59.92 which makes no sense.

To get 59.94, Media Time would have to be 1501.5 which can be found if all the stts values were averaged.

((128*1501) + (128*1502)) / 2

This would make a lot of sense since Media Time has to be an integer and for some reason Contour is using 90000 as the timeScale instead of 90029 but there's probably a very good reason for that.

If a program were to use 1501, say the first sampDur value, then that would be 90000/1501 which comes out to 59.96.

=====================
DATA

Movie Header (mvhd)
- timeScale: 90000
- duration: 384384

Track Header (tkhd)
- duration: 384384

Edit List (elst)
- Track Dur: 384384
- Media Time: 1502

Media Handler Header (mdhd)
- timeScale: 90000
- duration: 384384

Sample to Time (stts)
- numEntries: 256
- Odd# sampDur: 1501
- Even# sampDur: 1502

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Correction.

To get 59.94, Media Time would have to be 1501.5 which can be found if all the stts values were averaged.

((128*1501) + (128*1502)) / 256