For the past 5 years I have been using Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, and now I’m learning how to use Color. But for all this time, there is one program that still alludes me… Cinema Tools.
What is it? What does it do? I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who uses it… I like the name, sounds very professional.
Well, I still don’t know what is is COMPLETELY used for… but I learned a few things yesterday, and it kinda saved my life.
I may have written about this some time ago, but we reshot a scene, involving Brett, in his bedroom… because the first time I shot it, I was not too happy with the way it turned out. So we decided to go in and reshoot… well, it had been so long since we shot anything for the movie, I forgot to check to see what frame rate I was in, and I ended up shooting in 30i – and the film was shot in 24P*.
*Note – 30i means 29.97 frames per second, interlaced… and interlaced just basically means it creates a bunch of horizontal lines to create the image. 24P means that it was shot in 23.97 frames per second, Progressive… which means that it was one solid image, as opposed to those crappy lines.
What’s the big deal you ask? Well… interlace lines serve a purpose in their own right, but they DO say that having a progressive image will give you more of that “film look” – although some would argue that point. But the main thing is, I shot in 24P, and now I’m stuck with footage in 30i, I didn’t think this would be that big of a deal, but once I started workign with the footage, I immediately noticed a lot of nasty stuff, like jagged edges instead of smooth, and a lot of busy lines where there shouldn’t be.
So I thought about it… and said “I gotta reshoot” and then I said to myself… No way, not happening. We have to live with this, I can’t reshoot again. So I started trying to figure out ways to effectively fix the problem… I tried the de-interlace filter provided by FCP, but that never does the job. I knew the first thing I had to do was get the footage into 24 fps, and that’s when I realized, that Cinema Tools MIGHT do that. So I opened the clip in the program, and first thing I did was click some random button that said “conform” and it gave me the option to conform the footage to 24fps… and then bam! I had progressive footage in 24p. Just like that… and I didn’t have to do hardly anything at all.
Then I discovered a snag… since you are removing frames to create this frame rate, the time codes are different. So the scene that I had already edited in 29.97, is now completely off… so I gotta recut the whole scene. No big deal, only the third time I’m editing this scene. But then I discovered one other snag… all the audio iiiiiiiissssssss vvvvvveeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyyy llllllllooooooow. But that’s easy… pitch shift, right? Yup, exactly… I shifted the pitch (which makes a voice higher or lower) and now, Brett sounds like Brett again.
So, problem solved, and I learned something along the way!
