A gotcha to look out for.

Panasonic wrote a handy little application for their DVCPRO HD codec….the DVCPRO HD Frame Rate Converter. This allows you to take footage shot at 60p (with the intention of it being used as slow motion) and convert it to 23.98 and give you smooth slow motion. It allows you to convert DVCPRO HD into many other frame rates, but this usage is the most common, and very useful. On a show I edited on an Avid, we had to take the footage shot at 60p and have a dub facility run it thru a special converter box and dub it onto another tape. This converter allows me to bypass that workflow.

But there is a “gotcha.” If you attempt to convert the footage in your main project, you can’t. It will give you an error message: “No video file found in selected clip.” I followed the instructions to a “T.” I selected the file in the Browser, went to the TOOLS menu and selected DVCPRO HD Frame Rate Converter…but still got that message. Like many processes in FCP, there is a workaround.

Create a new project with the same settings and import the clips you need to convert. Go thru the steps outlined in the instructions and BOOM, it works. What this does, if you set this up in the conversion settings (which I suggest you do) is create a new media file. Import that clip into the new project, then copy it into the old project and you are all set.

A slow motion clip that is as smooth as silk.