Blackmagic Forum

Hi all!

I'm working on my own documentary in which i'll be using a lot of archived footage which was shot mostly by amateurs during the time from 2005 to 2011. I've got a huge amount of footage available but the variation in frame rates, PAR's, resolution and codecs is vast. (It's a big mess )

To make it workable i was thinking if making a batch list and putting it through a Teranex standards conversion and putting a recorder behind that, possibly a HyperDeck. This way i'm hoping to force all footage to be in the same frame rate, PAR and resolution (HD or if it works out all the way op to 4K to have some cropping room)

Now what i couldn't figure out is how to easily set up the input. Dealing with all these different formats makes it difficult. I believe to understand that HyperDeck does not play back most delivery formats (AVI, WMV, MPG) and most stand alone media players use built in upscalers which i'd like to avoid to let Teranex to the upscaling. The Blackmagic Media Express software also doesn't output these messy formats. Do i have to use an UltraStudio with some editing software to play out a sequence containing the raw footage?

If possible i would prefer to convert the footage clip by clip instead of ending with a single huge file.

Did anyone here try to do this before and used this BMD workflow? Of should i search for an alternative way of achieving this?

Thank you very much!
Bas

This may be something better tackled in Resolve.

Be warned that if you have a situation that (say) goes from 29.97 -> 23.98, you can run into all kinds of motion judder problems. You may want to seriously consider what common denominator format might best suit the project.

One network that I think does this very well is CNN, and for their history-based archival projects, they generally do the entire show in 29.97 and then de-interlace old 29.97 SD content and then take new 23.98 or 24-frame content, add 2:3 pulldown, and deal with it in 29.97. What is a huge problem is if they have an old 29.97 source tape with 23.98 film in it, and that inevitably has odd field problems here and there. You can cut around this to a point if there aren't any sync issues.

Snell Alchemist is a very sophisticated (and costly) system that handles complex conversion very well, but it requires some thought and skill to use it. And it costs a mint. I think Resolve can suffice in a budget-crunched situation or when the clips are short and minor video problems can be forgiven. In some cases, you may have to play around with Optical Flow, Nearest, and Frame Blend to find the best setting for specific frame rate issues. In other cases, It might be possible to take (say) 25fps footage and just set it to 24fps in Clip Attributes, which should have no issues except for playing 4% slow.

If you going to get files with so many formats then Resolve is last tool for such a task.
Overall it's going to be nightmare and you either do it quickly or well. If well best way are open source tools. If you know Python then you can write script which will automate most of it.

Teranex AV would work i guess.. Your playout device can switch in resolution and framerate.. But the Teranex will output 1 and the same output.. (Not sure if aspect ratio will be corrected at all times..

But the output of the teranex is a Set and forget one.. So what comes in will automatically get scaled to the set output parameters..

If a hyperdeck is the best solution is up to you.. The faster approach would be direct to harddrive on your machine.. But all depends on the situation.. If you first want to archive it.. A hyperdeck could be the better option.

Hey guys! (Wow, i was kinda waiting for a notification to drop in my mailbox. Sorry for my late response!)

Thanks for all the info and insight! I don't think software/Resolve would be a viable option due to the amount of footage. I'd rather set up a batch and stream it out through a hardware solution. I think Xtreemtec's solution is the way i had in mind, so i'm just going to give it a shot and play around with it for a bit.

Thanks for all the help! I'll try to share some results once we get to the post production process.

All the best,
Bas

Just remember that Teranex is poor tool for fps conversion. Scaling, deinterlacing etc. should be fine.

Andrew Kolakowski wrote:Just remember that Teranex is poor tool for fps conversion. Scaling, deinterlacing etc. should be fine.

I just did a bunch of NTSC to 23.98 conversions using the Teranex AV and the results were excellent. Granted, the footage had very little motion in it, but nevertheless, I was very happy with the result.

Maybe source was film originated with pulldown. In this case going back to 23.98 should give you good end result (sometimes perfect). Otherwise it will be converted with blending method and this is far from being perfect. I'm sure you will hit this problem sooner or later.

Also- do you check end result on TV (at native fps) or PC monitor?