Is this the best Sony FX1000 can do?

[Chris Medico]

Sounds good Doug. You will get it figured out. We will help as much as we can.

[Jeff Pulera]

I should mention that my comments are not meant to be critical; rather, it helps to understand the motivations and thoughts of the poster in order to help come up with a viable workflow solution.

Doug, it will be best not to mix frame rates. As you already have a great deal of footage shot at 24p, maybe stay with that then. If you start mixing frames rates in the timeline, the "look" will be different.

Thanks

[Doug Swift]

Jeff,

I didn't take any offense. Quite the opposite, I appreciate the conversation more than I can say.

And you hit on the crux of the matter. I have some material in the 24p that I think is very strong, and so I would certainly like to stay with it and keep the look consistent. I must say, I sure like the look of the 30p footage I shot yesterday. Of course it was in HDV as well--and I have to make the same decision there: stay with DV from here on out for consistency, or switch to HDV.

Chris, I'm still stuck on how to send you a clip. It looks to me like I need to produce a file to put into Dropbox. I can't figure out how to produce a file direct from camera and not use Elements. Just out of curiosity, is the extraction process your are proposing something that a pro NLE would do?

Thanks again for your encouragement, patience and help.

Doug

[Chris Medico]

Yea, I can remove the pulldown when I bring the media into Media Composer.

Have you tried a capture using Windows Moviemaker? That will capture DV straight to disk.

Recording Video into Windows Movie Maker (Part 1 of 3)

And its free.

[Doug Swift]

Chris,

I think I'm making progress. Movie Maker gave me an error reading. I researched it on a forum, and was lead to WinDV. WinDV couldn't read the device. Before I got too far into that problem, I noticed that it was going to save the file as an .avi. PE does that. So I went ahead and saved the file through PE (it also saves in Windows format, so I did that too), and I now have them both in Dropbox.

Now, for sharing with you . . . I've found links to your e-mail, but not your e-mail itself. Once I have that, this will be done, and I will have learned something new!

Thanks,

Doug

[Chris Medico]

I think we are on the verge of getting things straightened out for Doug. Progress was made today.

[Adam Gold]

Just another voice here.... the FX doesn't really actually shoot anything but 60i, and that is what you should always shoot with this cam. 24p only mimics the worst aspects of film, and 30p is good for web but nothing else, and that's being converted anyway. In the future, shoot everything 60i and convert in post. And move up to Premiere Pro. All your problems will be solved. (The Z5 does actually shoot real 24p and 30p if for some mysterious reason you actually like or need these frame rates.)

Fort the moment, however, you are stuck with these oddball frame rates so you will have to stick with them unless you can find some artistic justification for changing midstream.

[Chris Medico]

The FX does shoot true 24p (23.97 actually) but it can't record it directly to tape since 24p isn't a part of the DV or HDV standard.

The trick is to properly remove the pulldown and assemble the progressive frames from the 30i stream. I've done it on a sample clip Doug provided and he was very pleased with the results.

[Adam Gold]

Well, it's a bit of a semantic issue as it can't record it, as you've noted, so you can't get true 24 or 30p out of the cam. It shoots 24p over 60i, as you've noted, so it's a little silly to say it shoots it but can't record it. Can it be "reassembled" into the real thing? Apparently so, but why go through all that when 24p almost always looks worse than 60i? (Just read all the threads started by people wondering why their 24p looks so terrible.)

[Doug Swift]

I can see now that my mistake was shooting in 24 p, and once I did that PE was an unsuitable software program.

Chris has offered a glimmer of hope that I might run all my tape through some third party program, but that seems to be pretty unwieldy, especially since this is neither the part of filmmaking I do best, nor enjoy most. More chance for error and frustration. I downloaded a trial of Premiere Pro, and I see I can export in DV 24 p. Problem solved, right? (Except for the difficult conversation with my wife.) I'd hoped I could import in the right setting, but I don't see this option amongst the presets.

It's been an education, and I appreciate everyone's input.

Doug

[Adam Gold]

Sure, the presets exist. Once you start a new project and name it, Premiere gives you a choice of formats, either DV 24p or HDV 1080 24p. Just click on the appropriate format and it will drop down. Choose what you want and you are off to the races.