Converting to 24p

Please post your experience here with converting 30p to 24p.
What software do you use?
What is the cheapest way to do it, what is the best way?
Can you achieve the filmlook by simply converting it to 24p?

I have experienced some artefacts with After Effects doing 'high quality' frame blending down to 24P, with some judder on organic patterns in particular. Simply doing frame-blending with the 'low quality' settings in After Effects looks quite good to me.

My favourite method is to simply slow the footage down (by interpreting the footage as 24P in the project window directly after importing). This creates lovely eased motion, but of course if your footage demands sync sound, this isn't going to work.

Apple Compressor. Use Frame Controls and select Best in all the settings. It takes LOOOOONG but the result is nearly indistinguishable from the original footage in detail and shutter angle/cadence.

Does Compressor use the same method like Shake or Motion?

Compressor, Shake, Motion, After Effects all use pixel motion/estimation of some kind, I think Compressors version is called Optical Flow.

Thank you for clarification, Lee. Nice new "rolling" shutter logo by the way.

Thank you for clarification, Lee. Nice new "rolling" shutter logo by the way.

TimeWarpâ„¢, OpticalFlowâ„¢, TimeCurveâ„¢, Stretchy-stretchy-tick-tockâ„¢ (Ok, I made that last one up).

They all measure where a pixel is in one frame where it is in the next and estimate where it should be in any intermediate or newly generated frames, of course you have lots of parameters to play around with such as how many frames the new data is estimated from, how big the sample area is and so on.

They all seem to produce pretty amazing results and are broadly similar and all much much better than frame blending - but odd artefacts are not uncommon if you leave the settings on default and don't put in a bit of work setting the values up.


Just for you . . .

Just suppose I had an 8 core Mac and therefore loads or processing power. Should I pot all the settings to "best" or is it more complicated, depending on the complexity of the scene?

And, yes, thanks for the overdose...

An 8 core Mac would be a great place to start ! It can be quite slow on my lowly dual 2GHz.

It's a bit more complicated than putting everything on 'Best' or 'Full Quality', there are various values you might want to play around with to get a certain effect or deal with a certain scene.

Here are After Effect's TimeWarpâ„¢ parameters (below), but I normally use the default time-stretch and never play with these, if there are any artefacts for two or three frames I might make a soft mask around them and just use simple frame blending in that area for those few frames.

That was very helpful Lee. Thank you!