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So I just started work on a 23.976fps project that has some scenes that were accidentally shot in 24fps (of course, these scenes are sprinkled throughout every reel...). Sound was recorded at 23.976fps throughout -- at least that's what I was told. The editor also told me that they didn't convert any of the footage, so the Media Composer sequence has mixed frame rates.

Got the AAF today. Of course, all 24fps scenes are majorly out of sync. There are two workarounds I can think of, but if those don't work I'm out of options:

a) Perform a video mixdown in Avid prior to exporting, so at least all the video is in 23.976.

b) Export two AAFs: one from the regular sequence at 23.976fps, another from the same sequence reinterpreted as 24fps. Then combine both in Pro Tools.

Of course, neither workaround solves the drift issue, but I'm hoping that at least the In points for each clip will sync up. And most clips are short enough for the drift to not matter. For longer clips I guess I'll just manually slow audio down by 0.1%...

Do any of you have experience with this sort of problem? Any ideas? I heard that Titan can deal with these types of problems, but that's definitely not in the budget.

4 Answers 4

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presuming you are working to the offline picture edit, you are also going to have to very carefully check sync against the online graded master, as that picture conform may have sync issues too

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Well, propably going for your option b), or manually syncing/slowing down, would work around this issue, but I think it will be better suggest to editing deparment, producer?, di supervisor, if there is any (it doesn't look like there is...), anyone, that keeping mixed frame rates is the very, very, very, VERY, problematic idea. There's no such standard like mixed frame rates for any distribution/broadcast. I don't understand why they made it that way, it's just wrong. If they would like to convert it at the end, syncing full mix, it also will generate problems. Good luck!

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Agreed to all above. Mixed frame rates is not a good idea. I'm not even sure how they can do a proper edit with all the audio out of sync? They probably said, oh let audio post fix it, when they could have at least changed the audio tc and then sync'ed it first.

I'd be surprised if the producer is fine with this, if they are, just bill them for the extra time it'll take to manually sync all the clips. Even a syncing patch job is a bad idea.

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Just wanted to follow up on this in case anybody stumbles across this question. Using two separate AAFs (as outlined in my initial post) did indeed do the trick. Of course, the only hassle is to manually combine the two, but since the framerate changes are confined to entire scenes and not just individual clips here and there that's not a big issue.

Next step is to test importing into and exporting out of DaVinci and see if that's still in sync with sound.

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