Frame rate dilemma

[Anthony Jarman]

Hey guys,

Probably a bit of a novice question here. But any help would be much appreciated.

A group of us are shooting a major documentary. The kit we have is a RED One and a Canon XLH1 coupled up with a Flash XDR for more run and gun shooting.

We had our first shoot in which we shot 24fps on the RED and obviously 25fps on the Canon which we then conformed using Cinema Tools to 24fps.

We our due for our second shoot next week. Should we stick with the way we're working or change the red frame rate to 25fps?

Our end result maybe be a relatively modest cinema release, but more looking at large scale DVD distribution?

The worry is if we change the frame rate to 25fps will it render our first set of 24fps red footage a lot more difficult to deal with in the edit.

Maybe this is something we should have tackled before our first shoot. But several (hopefully) reliable advice sources told us we need should use 24fps if it was available. Subsequently I have heard otherwise from a couple of people, including a focus puller on a RED shoot recently.

Hmmm. New to this work flow so any advice would be really great!!!!

Anthony

 

[victors]

Where will this be distributed?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

You should shoot at whatever makes the bulk of your footage the same speed. Shooting a whole movie at 25 fps and releasing it theatrically at 24 fps is not a big deal -- a number of movies have been released that way. You just have more issues in a 60 Hz country to factor in.

If there is just a little 25P Canon footage in the movie, then go ahead and stick to 24 fps for the rest. But if the majority of the footage in the final cut comes from the 25P Canon, then you should match your RED camera speed to that.

Changing 24 fps footage to 25 fps is not a big deal, nor is the other way around a big deal, but you don't want to be doing that a lot in post if you don't have to... so I try and figure out what the common denominator is going to be.

If you are shooting in a 50 Hz country, and editing there, monitoring there, etc. and there will be a lot of this 50 Hz Canon footage in the doc, then I'd shoot the RED at 25 fps.