Dealing with Frame Rate Challenges in a Motion Design Pipeline

Question

Hey everyone!Just wanted to share a bit about a recent motion design project I worked on, specifically my experience with frame rates. I received the initial footage in 23.976 fps and then did a few things with this footage:Tracked a phone replacement shot3D camera trackingVarious other tracking shotsAfter that, I sent off a version to a sound designer, and the sound design came back mapped to the 23.976 fps footage. Later, I received a graded version of the film, but it was sent back at 25 fps. This created a lot of issues: all my tracking work was off, the sound was out of sync, and I had to retime the in and out points of my graphics. To fix it, I changed my After Effects comp to 25 fps and retimed everything. To save some time, I exported the heavy shots and used Topaz AI to convert them to 25 fps.Then, further down the line, I received an edit back for reversioning purposes, and it was at 23.976 fps again—someone had used the 25 fps graded file but exported it at 23.976. This meant everything was out of sync once more.This frame rate issue turned out to be a major time sink for me on this project.I guess my question is, should I have handled this differently? For example, should I have asked the grader to send me a 23.976 fps version instead?If any motion designers have experience working in large project pipelines and know the best way to manage these kinds of frame rate issues, I'd love to hear your advice so I can streamline things in the future.Thanks.

Shebbe · Answer

I guess my question is, should I have handled this differently? For example, should I have asked the grader to send me a 23.976 fps version instead? A million times yes. If you spot immediate technical problems in a pipeline and you still have plenty of time to attempt to tackle them, always do. As you have experienced, your 'quick fix' is now biting you in the rear since they weren't aware of the issue and may have corrected it by themselves later without communication. In general camera source framerate should always be honoured in the stages of compositing and grading. Only at finalization/editorial these can be deviated for technical or creative intents. What maybe could've happened is that all frames where actually mapped to 25fps frame for frame rather than skipping or frameholding when the export was made. Perhaps in that case you could've set the framerate interpretation of that media back to 23.976 inside AE to solve it. Another thing you can consider in the same emergency quick fix context is changing the framerate of your comps. There is a setting that disables keyframe interpolation on time/framrate changes in the advanced comp settings. That should help treat it the same as what happened to a framerate converted clip.

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