Framerate Woes - No Con Standard?

[AnnaMayBelle]

Like anyone else who's ever decided to start making AMVs, one of the first things that was ever drilled into me was that I needed to read "A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video mk 2". I did, and naturally, I followed along with certain steps like editing my progressive FILM in 24fps and converting to 23.976fps later.

This was all fine and dandy until I ran into one or two contests that said they absolutely wouldn't take anything less than 29.97fps.

...What?

Are we expected to convert our 23.976fps sources to 29.97fps? I must say, this has me very confused. Any input?

[Zero1]

Sounds that way, and it's likely due to whatver projector or hardware they will be using.

23.976 is still the "correct" way of doing it for online distro and such where the end user will be using a progressive display; but for conventional TV and other interlaced displays running at 59.94/60hz; you are required to change the framerate to 29.97 so that it can keep sync (old TVs are dumb when it comes to framerates because they only ever expect one or two different signals). Same can be said for projectors and such; I understand there can be timing issues on them which is why some cons ask you to leave about 10 seconds or black video at the start and end.

You should check out the AVISynth functions, there are a few ways to increase the framerate, but make sure you find a way that either telecines or duplicates frames, otherwise it will just be sped up and lose sync with the audio.

[Minion]

i don't believe i've ever seen a contest that asked for 23.976. it was only tolerated.
29.97 has been convention standard since i started editing.

[Zarxrax]

ADTelecine()

If you need it to be upper field first, ADTelecine(1).

[TaranT]

TMPGEnc

[808-buma]

not to add confusion to the mix by adding this tangent, but I've had this problem too.

Would one get better results (if you have a video that had moving masks done at the 23.97 fps) to do as Zarxrax suggests and use AVISynth to do the pre-process converison for you, or use TMPGEnc's 3:2 pulldown for the encode?

I will have to try and figure out which would be better, but if you guys and gals have already done this, whats your opinion?

[Zarxrax]

If you use tmpgenc to do 3:2 pulldown on playback, then it basically does the same thing that the function I posted does, only it does it when you play it back...

[808-buma]

ah, okay - I see the difference

thanks

[BasharOfTheAges]

Some cons (but not very many) are rather strict with specific guidelines on frame rate, video resolution, padding of blank footage (before, after or both). Your best bet is to make note of what you need for each format you want to have (either for multiple con submissions and/or multiple online distro formats) and set aside a large amount of space for an encoding folder. This folder can get rather big (I've been asked for several very specific encodes by cons in the past, so this folder has gotten to be a good 12 GB or so) After you're done, compress the thing with winrar and shove it onto a back-up DVD.

[Scintilla]

If you use tmpgenc to do 3:2 pulldown on playback, then it basically does the same thing that the function I posted does, only it does it when you play it back...

And the advantage of this is that the frame rate is still 23.976 at the encoding stage, which means, if you hold the bitrate constant (say, 8000kbps), you get more bits per frame, on average, which may help visual fidelity and certainly won't hurt.

Did you try asking the contest coordinator if such an MPEG-2, encoded at 23.976fps with the 3:2 pulldown upon playback flag set, would fly? I make a habit of checking about this whenever I see a con I might submit to that doesn't make it clear in the rules (like Otakon 2007).