How I shot myself in the foot… PAL!

So in an attempt to be all artsy fartsy, I screwed myself! Over the past few years I have been shooting a documentary on this great little HD camera and skillfully selected 1080i50 to shoot in. Now, don’t ask why, it goes back to my undergraduate days in Colorado. Days that tend to be a bit blurry due to circumstances of my control:).

ANYWAY, I am shooting away and loving the footage and the subject. I get into FCP and throw the baby on a timeline and edit away. FIRST mistake was editing the whole forty minute film on a 1080i60 timeline thinking the conversion would be just fine. After all, one doesn’t have to render that conversion on the time line anymore! Great! Right?! NO.

So, I get all the way done, do an huge render and another huge render to find out that the conversion is less than sufficiant. I know what you techie type are thinking at this moment and well, keep those thoughts to yourself, or don’t! I would love to hear your solution. But this is my journey and damnit it has become my mission to stop anyone else from having to go down the long and winding road I traveled.

Here is where my research journey begins. I hop on line hoping to find the quick fix and nothing. Or at least very little. Digging through the depths of Google I happened upon a great website, CreativeCow.com.  You see, my first attempt was to do a direct conversion from my FCP timeline to compressor.

After a million different tests on my own, I finally found this one guy on creativecow.com who had the answer. Thank you Mike Shea…

Export movie directly from fcp to compressor

Choose Advanced Format Conversion - dv ntsc

Go to the inspector window, and in the encoder pane, click on video settings and change scan mode to - Progressive ( this gets rid of motion artifacts)  (I SKIPPED THIS STEP BECAUSE I SHOT IN 1080I50 WHICH IS INTERLACED)
Go to Frame Control Pane and set Frame controls to on. Using the Standard default settings will lead to fast processing time, changing settings to better or best will lead to a long, long wait (83 hrs for best setting on my macbook pro) *SEE BELOW FOR SETTING I USED

When the processing is complete, put your ntsc movie back in compressor, choose the 90 minute best quality dvd setting, change gop setting from 15 to 7 ( this stops any pulsing of image in certain shots) I also add a noise reduction filter and the sharpen edges filter ( I set it to about 20, as I found the ntsc conversion lead to a softening of image across the project)

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After a nail biting 24 hours of rendering it came out spotless! I was so impressed and relieved. Too bad there was a glitch on my end that I didn’t see while previewing the film so I knew I was going to be up against it again.

In the process of doing research I came across another option… Nattress.com   A ton of people thought this was the better option and was supposed to save me time. So in a huge time crunch to get my project off the computer for the film festivals I decided to give Nattress a run the second time around. Mistake? Maybe.

Graeme, the owner, was very helpful in the beginning as I bumbled my way through the program. Then my emails stopped being answered leaving me quite frustrated.  Below is the process I used to get marginal results - there is still a ton of trailing on the image.

Make my 1080i50 a quicktime movie like you said.
Putting that clip into a 1080i60 timeline and placing my clip on it.
I put on the conversion filter and open the filter menu on the clip.
my settings are as follows 1920 x 1080
not nested
upper
upper
pal to ntsc
not anamorphic to letter
high quality is checked
not ntsc dv
not progressive output
de itnterlace normal
tolerance 10 (as it comes)
Anti alias 0 (as it comes)
motion blur 15 (last time it was 100)
pulldown offset o

put the clip in the source clip box

I then”render all” on the time line - It appears there is another way to do this from watching your video, but I can’t quite figure that way out.

that rendered clip i export as a quicktime movie

and place it in the compressor using dvd 90 best. and render.

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Like I said, not great, but good enough for the time being. As I am going back to make one more adjustment to the film, I will use the compressor again as the results were really good. But the time was forever and it ties up my FCP while doing it.

So I leave you with this information and invite EVERYONE with any knowledge on this subject to speak up!

And in the future, shot NTSC for US distribution.

CHEERS!!!!