Why do I have to conform?

Question

I hope someone here can shed some light on my problem. I'm putting together an assemble edit for CG short that I'm help out on. We're in the process of locking each shot down to the exact frame count - which is where my problem comes in.
The animatics that i'm being given are at 60fps encoded in Cinepak. The final delivery of the project is going to be 720p at 30fps. Whilst we edit the shots I've been putting the 60fps animatics straight into a 30fps sequence and all was going swimmingly until we came to lock down the frame count for each shot.
When I import these animatics in my Bin in Final Cut Pro (I'm using 4.5), FCP seems to think these animatics are at 59.94fps. This is obviously an issue when doing a frame count.
I have one clip that is eactly 66 frames long (I've counted them in QuickTime just to check) but when I bring them on to a sequence at 60fps in FCP, I seem to loose 2 frames as it's only 64 frames long. I tried converting the movie to 30fps and putting it into a 30fps sequence, but when I import that movie FCP seems to think it's at 30.97fps and instead of it being 33 frames long it's 31 frames long.
The only way I can get FCP to recognise the animatic at a correct frame rate is to convert it to 30fps and then use Cinema Tools to conform the frame to 30fps. Then when I import it into my FCP project, it's correctly detected as 30fps and the frames are there.
If I overlay a conformed and unconformed version of this movie in FCP the action doesn't seem to move, I just loose the frames from the end of the shot.
So the questions I have are this...
Why do I have to conform a clip to 30fps when it already is at 30fps for FCP to correctly recognise it's frame rate when QuickTime and Compressor seem to recognise the unconformed version as 30fps just fine?
If I wanted to do a 60fps version how to I conform the framerate when Cinema Tools only can conform upto 30fps?
And finally, why can't FCP just recognise the framerate of a QuickTime movie?
I'm doing this all on a PowerMac G5 Dual 2.7Ghz with 2GB or RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.6.
thanks in advance
Andrew
PowerMac 500GHz G4 DP & PowerBook 1.25GHz G4   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  

Answer 1

Hey David,
Thanks for your response, I know the workflow is a little unusual but so is the project.
The reason the animatics are at 60fps is that they are motion captured and that was done at 60fps as they will be later used in a video game. The CG short is essentially a movie using the game assets and as it's 720p, it's 30fps.
I would have probably gone for image sequences too, but I was working with different shots coming from multiple artists and they are using Maya on Windows which doesn't give you much choice output for the PlayBlasts (Animatics), it seem to like AVIs the best.
Being that there was multiple revisions of each shot a day, to keep the files manageable we choose to do the PlayBlasts as Cinepak AVIs.
The edit I was putting together was only ever going to be an assemble edit, so the final frame count for each shot could be determined and then the Maya scenes would be sent to a post house for rendering. The final short would be all the shots in order back to back.
Hopefully that explains the strange workflow, if you have any tips on improving it if I have to do it again - please let me know.
I guess the framerate quirks will really be one of those mysteries!