Problems with reversing telecine pull-down

Question

I'm preparing to edit a feature film shot on S16mm. The film was telecined to HDCAM SR at 23.98 for the online. Than down-converted to DVCAM at 29.97 for the offline. I imported the flex files into FCP and captured a bin. Than ran the batch reverse telecine following all instructions in Cinema Tools manual. Clips were converted to 23.98, but when played in FCP strobe or flicker. I cannot for the life of me figure out why. The A-Frames hit on 0's and 5's and that's what all the clips start at.
Note, the strobing or flickering only happens when going out to an external NTSC monitor, not in FPC viewer or canvas.
Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

I see you're on FCP5... if you're about to bust into a feature edit you really might want to move up to FCP6. It's a bit more mature all around.
We just did a Super35mm project (offline in ProRes, and then a 2K DPX-based online) in FCP6, albeit with a slightly different workflow.
I assume you did the HDCAM SR to DVCAM downconversion because you didn't have an HDCAM SR deck and/or HD-SDI input mechanism for the system you're editing on, but you did have a firewire DVCAM deck or something similar.
If the issue was introduced during the HDCAM-SR to DVCAM step, perhaps that's where the issue lies. You may want to try to eliminate that possibility.
Other than that, I'd go through and verify that you are in fact looking at the right fields in the right order. Use whatever mechanisms you have available to you to view the fields independently of each other.
Also, if you're outputting 23.98 video to an external monitor, does that monitor support that output format? Or are you having telecine frames inserted during playback?
There's a limited amount of things that could be wrong here. If your canvas is accurately displaying all of the frames and looks normal, and there's no frames "bleeding fields" into each other when you step through it, and you're sure you're not MISSING any frames or fields, then the telecine frames must have gotten removed properly, that's the only logical conclusion. If that's the case, then your problem is either a bug (possible), a field dominance issue (which you seem to have ruled out) or it's in your external video monitoring system/path. i.e. monitor doesn't like the video it's getting, hardware doesn't support the video signal, something is flat out broken, etc.
That said, HDCAM-SR to ProRes or ProResHQ is a pretty reasonable mastering format for S16-acquired content. If all else fails, go rent an HDCAM-SR deck for the weekend, capture the whole project to ProRes/ProRes HQ, and boom, you're in your online @ 23.98. Just skip the offline altogether. You've already got your FLX files so you could batch the whole job pretty quickly. Storage is cheap.