I ran across a situation where the camera operator had to do some handheld shots out the window of a moving car, and decided to shoot them at 60fps, hoping that making the shot slow motion would smooth out the shot a bit. He didn't tell me about this, and so when I dropped the footage on my 24p timeline (after a P2 import), it not only wanted to render it, but it was playing at real speed, rather than slow motion.
So that's not going to work... what do I do?
The solution after the jump...
First, check out the clip properties. Open it in Quicktime and press Command-I for the info dialogue. Look at the FPS (frames per second). It should be something other than the sequence you're working with... in my case 60. When you play back the video, however, it will look normal speed. This is what we want to change.
The first idea was to deal with it in FCP. I changed the speed of the clip in hopes that Final Cut would figure out that it can use the extra frames. This didn't work... it just removed half the frames and then frame blended to add new ones back. How do I know? Because it looks stuttery and terrible. No good.
So then what I decided to do (which worked) was to reconform the clip in Cinema Tools. You can also do this in a batch. Here's how to do it:
1) Open Cinema Tools. It'll ask you about database stuff. Click to open a database and then just cancel to get out of the open dialogue. We don't need to do any database stuff here.
2) Go to "File", "Open Clip", and find your clip.
3) The video will open up. At the bottom of the screen, click "Conform..." (warning, this will change your quicktime file, so make a duplicate if you want to test)
4) Select the frame rate of your project (ie. 23.98), and click conform.
5) Quit Cinema Tools and open the file again in quicktime. Play it. Ta da! Slow motion!
That's it! Now just import the file into Final Cut, drop it on your timeline, and you're set. Make sure there are no render bars... this footage shouldn't have to be rendered now.
You can also do a batch conform in Cinema Tools to do this to many clips at once. Just make sure you're only dealing with the footage that you want to deal with though, because it can cause serious headaches otherwise.
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