Lost with 100B

[Ed Grabowski]

Hey everyone. In may I purchased a DVX 100B. I originally had an XL1 but it just fell apart from old age. I have been using the camera for little things here and there but not really using the 24p all that much. And now im getting ready to start another project, a 20 minute psychological short, and i fear that i am going to do something wrong with the 24p feature. Now i did do a lot of searching through the site to find an answer to my question before i posted this but i couldnt really make heads or tales of much of it, so i apologize for the same old post. Pretty much I am worried about the whole 24p thing when it comes to editing. I use Ulead Video studio and After Effects. I keep reading about "3:2 pulldown" and all this and im not sure exactly what that means. I cant understand the hundreds of answers on this site to the same question, i dont know why, i just cant grasp it for some reason. I want to shoot in the 24p, edit in Video Studio, do the touch up's etc. in After Effects, and export to DVD. Now, pretty much all i really am dying to know is if i just make sure that my two programs know that this is 24p footage will everything be ok?? Or is there some sort of pull down thing i have to do first? I have already tried this mind you, and the result looks very very choppy. I know im doing something wrong and i really dont want to screw this up. Im so used to the Xl1. If anyone can help id appreciate it, maybe someone uses Video Studio as well. Once again i apaologize for asking the same question everyone has seen a million times. Thanks guys.

[Corey Callahan]

No question is stupid here....

This is actually quite a good one....and although I don't know the answer, im interested to see a response from someone who does. I am currently looking into purchasing one of these, and this is something I would need to know.

By the way Ed, how have you liked your new camera so far?

[David Mullen]

First of all, you should remember that the camera always records 480/60i (NTSC) no matter whether you capture in 24P, 24PA, 30P, or 60i. So you can just treat the recording as normal 60i footage in editing and cut away, just using the 24P mode for the film-look effect.

In that case, you should use normal 24P, not 24P Advanced. And once you start cutting shots together, your pulldown cadence will be mixed up, which only matters if you ever try and extract progressive-scan later from the edited 60i master.

NTSC is 60 fields per second, interlaced-scan, aka 60i. So a camera set to capture in 60i will take 60 images per second, each image a field containing every other line of video; the next field will contain the alternate lines. A camera set to 24P will take 24 images per second but as whole video frames, not fields. But in order to get recorded as 60i (and to be viewed on a normal 60i monitor), 24 frames has to be converted to 60 fields. Simply splitting each video frame into two fields would create 48 fields, so the camera has to insert 12 extraneous fields in a subtle pattern to add up to 60. This is what is known as 3:2 pulldown. 24 fps film when transferred to NTSC also gets a 3:2 pulldown. The word "pulldown" actually refers to the fact that NTSC is actually 59.94i, not 60i, so 24 fps film has to be slowed down to 23.976 fps in the telecine.

You can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2:3_pul...:3_pulldown.29

My basic point is that once the 24 fps footage is converted to 60i using a 3:2 pulldown, it can be edited as any 60i footage. The only trick is if you wanted to edit in progressive-scan so that you can create a progressive-scan master, for DVD or webcasting (computer monitors are progressive-scan). You can put either a interlaced-scan or progressive-scan recording onto a DVD but a progressive-scan recording will look better on a progressive-scan monitor (like an LCD screen.)

So if you wanted to create a 24P master instead of a 60i master, you'd want to remove the pulldown before you started editing so you wouldn't be mixing up the 3:2 pulldown cadence.

You can remove the standard 3:2 pulldown in many editing software (sometimes called "reverse telecine" I believe), but if you shoot 24P Advanced, it will be easier to remove the pulldown.

24P Advanced exists for only one reason: to get rid of the pulldown used to convert to 60i. Instead of a complex 3:2 pattern (see the Wikipedia chart) it basically has a whole frame of video that can be dropped to get quickly back to 24 frames. See here:

http://www.skidgel.com/blog/2005/12/...-24p-advanced/

This will look a little more "juddery" when watching the footage played back (your eye can slightly see the repeated frame pattern) but that's OK because you will be removing the pulldown when importing the footage into an editing software that can remove it (like FCP.) Once removed, you can edit in true 24P progressive-scan. When you are done, you can make a 480/24P master for DVD, webcasting, etc. and then create a second master where you add back a standard 3:2 pulldown for any NTSC tape copies you need to make. You don't need to do that for DVD's because DVD players add standard 3:2 pulldown when playing a 480/24P recording but sending the signal to an interlaced-scan TV set.

But like I said, you do have the option of just editing the material as 60i and creating a 60i master for DVD & tape dubs. In that case, you'd use normal 24P, leave the 3:2 pulldown in the footage, cut it up (throwing the cadence off) and leaving it as 60i.

Here's another good explanation of 24P vs. 24P advanced:

http://www.adamwilt.com/24p/#24pRecording

[Dave Findley]

Sorry for the stupid technical question, but if we're going to transfer to Digibeta for film festival, I assume we'd have to add back the pulldown, and since I always screw up using FCP, how does one add back pulldown? Thanks.