Syncing sound and picture in Premier

[Vespasian]

Okay you have a crystal camera, the work printer, and a mini disc recorder.

When you transfer your film through a work printer to premier, will premier automatically play it back at 24fps? When you transfer from the work printer to Premier does the film transfer at an exact 24fps or 23.976fps? If the film is put on premier through a work printer and can be played back at exactly 24fps you shouldn't have to do anything with the audio that you recorded on you minidisc right? If it is put on premier through the work printer and can be played back at 23.976fps then the audio recorded on the minidisc recorder would have to be slowed down by 1/10 of 1 percent (-1%) right? Is this about right? How does Premier playback your captured frames from the work printer? Can you speed up or slow down the frame rate by some kind of speed control on Premier?

[lightfeat]

Hi Vespasian

Glad to see you're finally coming around to the only really professional method for making a film. It's taken a while, but I think you're realising that if you're going to bother to go to all the effort of making a film, you should avoid nightmares before you start.

Along these lines, the very best way to proceed, in my humble opinion, is to get your camera synced to 25 fps (it will have to be a Nizo 6080 or Canon 1014XL-s to do this, but that's ok 'cos they're fantastic cameras) and transfer to PAL DV, input it into a PAL project in Premier, and you're laughing. If you live in NTSC land (America) then that's a bit trickier and not so good, and someone else had better advise you as to how to get the required 2-3 pulldown from a 24fps camera (which is better for NTSC transfer).

It can be done - perhaps Roger (Moviestuff) is best qualified to answer this one. He usually is!

Lucas Lightfeat

[MovieStuff]

Okay, first off the thing to specify is if you are transferring to PAL or NTSC. If you shoot at 25fps and transfer on the WorkPrinter frame by frame, then it's obvious that the video will play back at the same speed you shot your film at; 25fps.

Now, NTSC does not run at 25fps but at 30fps. In actuality, NTSC doesn't even run at 30fps but, rather, -.1% slower which would be 29.97fps. None the less, there are STILL 30 frames for each "screen second", even though that second is really -.1% slower than real time. If you shot film at 30fps and transferred it on the WorkPrinter frame by frame, it would not play back at 30fps but, rather, -.1% slower. Therefore, the film originally shot at 30fps will play back on video at 29.97fps as well.

So what happens if you shoot at 24fps and transfer on the WorkPrinter frame by frame? Well, for starters, the footage would play back too fast unless you change its running speed. You can do this in Premier by placing the clip on the timeline and applying an 80% speed change which, for the sake of illustration, will apply a "whole frame pulldown" scheme that merely doubles every fourth frame. This will effectively produce 6 artificial frames for every 24 frames of screen time. Since 6 artificial frames plus the 24 original frames equals 30, you have stretched the original one second of film screen time to one second of video screen time by mathmatically stretching the 24 across the 30.

However, as mentioned before, one second of video screen time is REALLY only 29.97fps and not 30. Since the 30 frames of video are going by -.1% slower, so will the 24 film frames ALSO be moving by -.1% slower. That makes the 24fps actually run at 23.976fps.

So, IF you shoot crystal synched at 24fps and transfer on either a Rank or a WorkPrinter, then the film will be running -.1% slower on video playback. Your sound would have to be adjusted accordingly for longer takes; shorter takes will work perfectly fine and you can actually record your audio on video tape. But if you want your sound to be dead-nuts accurate no matter how long your take is, then your camera should be crystal synched for 23.976fps and not an even 24.

Hope this makes sense! [img]smile.gif[/img]

Roger

[mcarter4121]

Not that I understand any of that yet, not having hands on, when I transfer film to video, it comes out as 15fps. and I don't know why. Single frames are made into an avi file automatically.

Premiere will double each frame for me of the capture file when I import it so it becomes 30 or 29.97 unless I tell it to make it 15 fps.

[Vespasian]

DAMN! Moviestuff you straight broke it down perfectly I mean I understand everything. Thats all I needed. Hey you wouldn't happen to want an aprentice or anything would you? I'm trying to get a grant right now to make my first real super 8 film. I doubt it's going to work but whatever I'll keep trying. I want to enroll in the Acedemy of Arts College in San Francisco in Spring of 2004 for film. I think that if I had the right equipment to make a good sound movie that the acedemy would grant me a full scholarship. I've been talking with them and they pretty much told me that if I should them somehting amazing that they would give me a scholarchip. They keep bugging me though, it's kinda annoying.

Thank you again.