60 fps and the curse of adobe

This post is somewhat of a reference for myself, in case i forget how to do it in the future.

I have been making a film/music video, and in it I needed someone to film stuff for me remotely, ie I wouldn't be able to film them with my Nikon D90, so they'd send me this footage. The possibility of slightly different formats didn't seem so daunting at first. But when I received the footage, it became a matter of how to get Adobe Premiere and After Effects to give me the right footage from these two formats. It was a pain to figure out the order to work the footage.

First, I wanted to convert my friend's footage to nice black/white. She filmed it with a flip, which was 1280x720 at 60 fps. My D90 films at 1280 by 720 at 24 fps. (apparently the slower 24 fps is more suitable for classic film.) My Adobe premiere settings were all set for the D90 imported video, and obviously if i imported the raw flip footage it would be choppy and have lots of dropped frames.

So far, I've only figured out how to convert frame rate. I created a new Premiere project which was a 60 fps, 1280x720 format. I encoded it to raw (not H.264) video at 24 fps. This was color footage that would load into the project where the other D90 videos were being edited.

Adobe Premiere: Project for import
Sequence Settings - Preset saved as "60fps to 24fps conversion import"
New Sequence->General
Editing mode: Desktop
Timebase: 60.00 frames/sec
Video: 1280 horizontal 720 vertical
Pixel aspect: 16:9
Display format: 60 fps
Audio: 32000 Hz
Preview file format: Microsoft AVI
Codec: DV 24p advanced

For export:
File->Export->Media
Format: Uncompressed Microsoft AVI
Preset: Custom
Video codec: V210
Quality: 100
Width: 1280
Height: 720
Framerate: 24
Field: Progressive
Aspect: D1/DV NTSC 16:9

After the 60 fps media has been converted to 24fps progressive, import the new video into the project of Adobe premiere where it will be used in editing. This time, link it with aftereffects by selecting Replace Footage with After Effects Composition. It will open a new after effects project in which you can add an effect, such as grayscale. To render in Premiere, firstyou can play the video back and forth slowly, basically to let it all render into ram. This I mean using the mouse and adding the clip onto a sequence timeline, then playing that chunk of the sequence back and forth until no more skipped frames appear. My guess is either this is generating a preview that is smooth, or it is rendering each frame for the 24fps needed for output.

Tomorrow I will attempt to edit all the frames.