6/1000 FPS

When we set out to shoot our feature, The Red Machine, we were running Final Cut v. 5.0.4, and through the entire shoot, that’s what we used to unwrap all the footage from our Panasonic HVX200, taking off the MXF wrapper and creating QuickTimes that Final Cut could use. And everything was great…

…or so we thought.

Welcome to a nasty glitch.

But first, the background: after we got to a picture cut we were happy with and got ready to do our color correction, we did a lot of research and decided to do that work in Adobe After Effects; we’re still in search of a color correction session at a facility, but we knew that working in AE, we’d be able to get a really sophisticated and beautiful version done on our own. Moreover, in AE, we’d be able to do all our effects work in the very same project, just creating a precomp to touch up whatever area of the image needed work — painting out booms that dip into frame, for example, or replacing modern set details like lightswitches with period equivalents.

Fortunately, Automatic Duck makes a great program that converts a Final Cut sequence into an After Effects project. We broke our 83-minute movie into eight reels, then exported an XML version of each reel , using Automatic Duck’s own XML format.

But when we imported the XML into After Effects, we found that nearly every cut was a frame or two out of sync. And what was worse, there was no consistency about how many frames things were out of sync, or in which direction. A series of e-mails back and forth with Automatic Duck ensued, and they were incredibly helpful and responsive.

After getting copies of our projects (both FCP and AE), our QuickTimes and the original MXF files, the people at Automatic Duck realized what we had missed: FCP 5.0.4 had converted all our MXFs into QuickTimes movies that ran at 23.97 frames per second, rather than the 23.976 fps that they were supposed to be. This 6/1000 fps difference was not something we had ever picked up on — especially since our sequences were all set to 23.976, and Final Cut had no problem playing the 23.97 clips in those sequences. Never even asked to render them.

I was stunned that no one had experienced this before — surely someone else must have shot with the HVX200, unwrapped in FCP v. 5.0.4, then converted their sequence to an AE project. But Automatic Duck, at least, had never encountered it before. They were, however, able to make an Automatic Duck patch that enabled AE to interpret the 23.97 clips as 23.976 during import; but even with that, the sync slippage remained, which meant the entire movie had to be hand-reconciled.

Last night, at 10:30 p.m., just before setting out to a New Year’s Eve party, I finally finished the last of that reconciling — which actually was a very nice end to the year, because that was one job I didn’t want to have lingering in 2008.

However, I’d be very curious to find out if in fact other people did encounter this problem, and if they did, how they solved it…