DVCPro HD Varicam Footage, PLEASE HELP

Question

Hello,
I am in a bit of a tricky situation and I hope someone can help. I have 6 hours of 24p Varicam footage captured into final cut and its already been edited into a sequence. However, as I just received this footage and sequence, I realized that it was all captured at 59.94 fps and the extra frames were NOT dropped. I guess the person who captured it forgot to tick the little box that says to remove the extra frames. So now I have all 60 frames, which are simply duplicates of the 24 that the camera actually recorded.
At first I thought I could use cinema tools to remove the cadence and render out the true 24p footage for myself. However, when I opened the clips in cinema tools, the button was greyed out and I couldn't do it.
I then thought I would try it in final cut pro (version 5). So I highlighted a clip, went to tools, remove advanced pulldown. A message popped up saying that it couldn't remove the advanced pulldown because the footage I have is not DV25 or DV50.
I then thought I could recapture the footage and it would hopefully match up to the timeline. However, when I looked at my capture settings, the box that you tick says "remove 2:3:3:2 advanced pulldown from DV25 and DV50 footage". I found an article with screen captures of the correct settings to use for DVCPro HD Varicam footage and this message should say "remove extra frames etc.." but should make no mention of DV25 or DV50 footage.
What is up with that? Am I missing something? I used the DVCPro HD 720/24p easy setup? Any thoughts?

Answer 1

First off let me just warn you about Cinema Tools. DO NOT conform your footage to a new frame rate. This will make your problem worse. The Remove Pulldown feature relies on fields and won't help here either.
I have posted a few topics on this exact subject over the past several months. Unfortunately, the forum archives are not very deep here.
In short, there is no easy way to fix your problem without recapturing using the FCP DVCProHD 24P capture preset. For me, recapturing using the Final Cut DVCProHD wasn't a good option since I rented the deck and didn't budget a second rental to recapture.
In my experience, the suggestions I've seen posted so far are not going to fix your footage cadence. Placing such footage in a DVCProHD 24FPS sequence will result in strobing and studdering.
Here's one of my older posts relating to the topic, although in this post, my problem was compounded by the fact that I attempted to conform the footage to 24P, only to find that the new version of Cinema Tools wouldn't let me return it to 60P. Here' how I got it back to 60P:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1070537#1070537
After getting the footage back to 60P (which is what you have now) I had to import the footage into After Effects and place it in a 24FPS composition enabling frame blending. I then rendered all the footage from AE and replaced it in Final Cut. What a pain! It was the only way I could find to get rid of the strobic effect caused by the odd cadence.
Although it didn't work for me in that incident (since all my meddling removed the Panasonic tags from the footage) there is a tool that could fix this for you without recapturing, although I'm convinced it would probably take longer than a simple recapture. Panasonic has a free FCP plugin on their Varicam support page that allows FCP to deal with redundant frame removal. It works well one clip at a time, but in my experience messes up the audio (actually deletes audio to be precise). The tool is mostly intended for slow-mo stuff where audio isn't really necessary. You can use this tool, then re-apply the audio tracks through the Add feature of QuickTime Player, or by manually re-applying audio tracks and exporting in Final Cut.
Recapturing is the simplest solution. Just take the footage offline, then recapture the clips using the correct FCP DVCProHD 24P preset rather than the 60P one. Unless you have Timecode Breaks or Cadence errors in the footage itself (I regularly get both) this should work.