Q: Custom Framerates No Longer Available???

SO you're delivery frame rate is 23.98.

Good luck with your projects.

YYou could try to find a different application. No professional applications do what you want, but there are a lot of open source apps that might do it. Maybe Sony Vegas does. If you're going to Blu-ray the material's going to have to go to a standard video frame rate. Better you see your material in that frame rate first than to be shocked by the outcome when you burn the disc.

Silent films from the turn of the last century and most of my Super8mm stuff is 18 frames. Converting these to modern display technologies is not trivial. 10 seconds of old film is 180 frames. Ten seconds of modern video is either 240 frames or 300 frames, roughly. You need 60 or 120 additional frames of imagery to fill up the time. In the olden days of telecine, direct broadcast, and film-to-tape transfers, back when 16mm SOF was 24 frames and had to be converted to 29.97 frames, we used a pull down system on the telecine that converted frames to fields and held one frame so the odd and even fields from adjacent frames could be interlaced. This sort of disguised and smoothed out the frame rate change without altering the length of the film or altering the sound playback pitch.

I think if you examine the world of film preservation, you will find that frame rate conversion is done using a similar technique. Here in the States, everything I do is (roughly) 30 fps. I have no personal experience using any 24 fps formats (I do no know if there is a suitable interlaced format you can use that will make you happy) since I stopped shooting 16mm film. Come to think of it, my last several 16mm film projects were shot at 30fps for more precise and crisp motion capture and easier conversion to common NTSC videotape formats.

Sorry we can't offer a simple solution within FCPX for you, it's just not built that way.

IF you are creating Blu-ray or DVD discs, you can only create them at video standard frame rates, not at 18fps.

William Frankeberger wrote:

  Curiously, I understand that FCP7 did allow other frame rates...  What happened?

Actually, the lowest editing timebase setting available on FCP 7 was 23.98.

As discussed earlier, the frame rate of the output files could then be changed to a custom rate if run through Compressor – either by Send to Compressor or importing the exported self-contained  movie into Compressor.

Russ

DVDs can be 23.98, 24, or 29.97. When you watch it on a television set pulldiwn is added to the lower frame rates to conform it 29.97 in North America.

CAn tell you what properties software or hardware the companies that do this work as using.

AS we've said Compressor and other software has more control in conversion and may provide a better result.

Yeah, I'm a bit late to the show, but here's what I can add, in case anyone does some searching for stuff like this:

You can use QuickTime Pro 7 to edit at 18 fps, but then you're rather limited in what types of editing you can do, of course!

I, too, have Super 8 transfers, and would love to edit them in FCPX at 18, but that's a no-go. I've found that 29.97 or 30 fps results in much smoother display -- that is, reduced stuttering -- than 24 fps. I had a particular scene in which converting to 24 fps looked horrible. Redoing it at 29.97 fps was a great improvement (I was using iMovie 9.0.x at the time, which doesn't offer 30 fps. Not sure which I would have used if it did).

Yes, converting from 18 to 24 doubles every third frame. But going from 18 to 30 doubles two frames, then "singles" the next. So you get 2 2 1 2 2 1 . . ., which is significantly smoother than 1 1 2 1 1 2 . . . .

And this is how frame rates are adjusted for DVDs.

Thanks for adding valuable information to the conversation. We recently tried to help someone using FCP7 edit 48fps which, consensus suggested, simply was not possible.

You're welcome.

BTW, I just tried the movie with the problem scene in a 60 fps project. This makes things smoother. If I were to redo this project, I'd probably do it at 60 fps. The pulldown is 4 3 3.