Premiere Pro seems to be taking the wrong FPS from iPhone native camera VFR video files

[wesplate]

I have this iPhone-recorded clip, shot in darkness with the native Camera app and set to 4K 30fps, Auto FPS on.

Therefore, I expect this clip to be 24fps.

The metadata of the file says:

Frame rate mode                          : Variable
Frame rate                               : 25.978 FPS
Minimum frame rate                       : 24.000 FPS
Maximum frame rate                       : 30.000 FPS

Premiere Pro reports the frame rate of the clip as 25.97, which is in the file, but Resolve and FCP both bring this in as 24fps, which is what I expect.

Are Resolve and FCP using the Minumum Frame rate from this file? Seems like it, and it is "more correct" I argue since the Camera app settings will definitely lead me to expect this to be a 24 frame clips.

All this leads me to think Premiere Pro is choosing the wrong frame rate in this situation. If I create a new sequence from this clip that sequence is going to be or is going to encourage me to make it also 25.97, and who is served by having a 25.97fps sequence?

File attached.

Thanks for considering this issue!

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hey Wes,

Good to hear from you. Another long walk, eh? 🙂

I looked at your sample clip in MediaInfo. It appears to be 25.97. I tried to verify in Resolve, and it shows as 24 fps. Since I can duplicate the behavior, something is amiss here. Thanks for providing the info. I hope we can get a response from the devs soon. 

Cheers,
Kevin

[wesplate]

Hey, there was some running in there too! 😂

In MediaInfo press Command-3 for "Text" view which is more expansive.

Thanks for having the team take a look.

🙌🏼

[Tom Nord]

Hey Wes, I hope you're well! 
So I had a look at the file and everything is working as designed in Premiere - we don't look for a minimum or maximum frame rate, we just take the framerate given in the file for better or worse. I also looked at the file in Resolve just to see how they're handling it and what I see is that they are indeed brining it in at 24fps. However, it is unclear to me if that is because they are looking at the Minimum Frame Rate or because they seem to bring most VFR files in at a nearest-neighbor common framerate - for example most of the files I tried didn't come in at the native framerate listed in MediaInfo but something standard. I guess you could argue the file would come in at 25fps if it was nearest-neighbor but honestly I don't know enough about what's happening under the hood to say anything definitive here. The other comparison I made though is the duration - you'll note that in Premiere you're seeing 2 more frames than you do in Resolve (look at frame 00:00:00:02 in PPro.. that frame doesn’t exist in the Resolve interpretation). I expect a side effect of conforming to a standard framerate is occassionally omitting some frames. I can say that the Premiere approach is one of preserving all the frames in the source. 
Where it seems you're taking the greatest issue however is in the automatic sequence generation - in Premiere creating a sequence based on this clip in particular will give it a framerate of 25.978 and yeah, that's a little funky. I could probably envision a feature request to allow the user to override the source's frame rate but then do you also put in an override for funky frame resolutions? 
So, long story short here, this isn't so much a bug as it is a feature request to have the option to interpret the file based on its minimum frame rate. And then perhaps a feature request for smarter sequence creation. I hope this helps. 

[wesplate]

Tremendous reply, thank you! I agree with all you said. I learned more
about the issue after my post here and using the average makes most sense.
A challenging issue.

I get it that the auto sequence generator just uses what it’s given, it
could invite user input for unusual frame rates.

Thank you for your time on this! 🙌🏼

[Media Editor]

I am on a PC with the latest version of Premiere.  The properties show a Frame Rate: 25.97 also.

[Michael Grenadier]

I remember going up to Wes many years ago at NAB to thank him for Automatic Duck... it was a great program.   Kevin, does Premiere now handle vfr material without issue?   Wes, have you tried using handbrake to convert to constant frame rate?   I've had some issues with Handbrake not successfully converting to CFR because I'm trying to assign the wrong frame rate to the handbrake output...  Not always obvious whether the "target" frame rate of the iphone footage, for example,  is 23.976 or 24 fps...  When this happens, reprocessing the with the alternate target frame rate fixes the issue.   Do you know what frame rate the iphone was set to record at?  

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @wesplate,

I found your post while cleaning up this forum. I moved it to "Ideas" for a feature request.

Thanks,
Kevin