Frame rate issues

[kristupes]

Does anyone know why DP doesn‘t support 23.98? Is there a way to work around it?
Any help would be great as I‘d rather not score a whole feature with time code out of sync...
Thanks.

[carrythebanner]

Don't know why it's not supported now, but it will be available in DP 6:

Other video/film scoring enhancements
DP6 now supports the following frame rates: 23.976 fps and 30-drop.

PDF press release

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Does anyone know why DP doesn‘t support 23.98? Is there a way to work around it?
Any help would be great as I‘d rather not score a whole feature with time code out of sync...
Thanks.

Your editor might be able to burn 29.97 non-drop visual code for you as a reference. Then put DP in that and follow that visual. PITA as HD is all in 23.98. C'mon DP6 - we need the code!

[bralston]

29.97nd is industry standard at the moment for audio (sound design and music) for motion pictures. Don't let anyone tell you different. If they are not willing to give you a standard codec DV QuickTime in 29.97nd with a window burn they either don't know how to do it...or don't want to take the time to do it. But any editor who knows what they are doing can do this in their sleep.

May that 29.97nd expectation change in the future?...sure...possibly and probably. But now...it has not.

If they are also hating the fact that they have to make one quicktime for the audio folks and another for the Fx folks...and another for foley, etc...Just have them create a standard DV quicktime (which is 29.97 by difinition) and window burn both the 29.97nd and 23.978 time codes on it for future reference to the HD master. Without showing the math of why it works...it will all work out.

Remember...a second is a second. It just matters how you are dividing up those seconds in smaller pieces. The hours, minutes, seconds on the various flavors of time codes should all always match once you are working off a video anyway.

[LittleLeadMen]

29.97nd is industry standard at the moment for audio (sound design and music) for motion pictures. Don't let anyone tell you different. If they are not willing to give you a standard codec DV QuickTime in 29.97nd with a window burn they either don't know how to do it...or don't want to take the time to do it. .

That's not entirely accurate. 29.97 non drop is the standard in North America, for motion pictures, but is not the unified standard around the world. Heck, it's only standard in the US for motion pictures. Television is another rate. I have friends who worked on Lord of the Rings who were working in 25 fps. So, it might be appropriate to write a response that's maybe less agitated and acknowledge that the reason the initial poster asked his/her question is because they have an actual need to work in a different time code.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Why does the 'standard' change every time I start working with a new editor?

[Kubi]

I simply convert every reel or scene to 29.97 in QT Pro and work to that. if the original file is 23.98, I end up with a few repeating frames every second. For scoring this makes absolutely no difference (couldn't edit hard FX with this method, but hey, I don't do sound design.) And since the audio is completely independent from the picture (in digital it's usually 48kHz) sync is never an issue.

[bralston]

For everyone who still frets about frame rates. Here is the "big secret" about recording audio that needs to be in sync to visual picture. Simply...the sample frequency of the audio has A LOT more to do with being in Sync...than the frame rate.

[Jim]

There are a few bits of misinformation here. First off HD has several different frame rates. There is no standard. Damnit.

There is 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97 and 59.94. Bites, don't it?

And for 29.97, there's drop-frame and non-drop frame. Non-drop is a case where a second is NOT a second. For example, if you go exactly ten minutes into a program that's non-drop, the time-code will not be 10:00:00. I think it'll be 10:10 or so. Drop-frame code matches real time, because video runs at 29.97 and not 30, and the counting has to drop a frame every 10 seconds to maintain actual real-time. There are the same number of frames in drop and non-drop. It's only the method of counting them that's different. Confused? Join the club.