24fps Editing in Premiere

So, you have some progressive (FILM) footage all in it's non-interlaced 23.976fps glory. You'll want to edit this in Premiere and make an nice 23.976fps amv, won't you?

Well tough.

"What?!?!" I hear you say.

"Tough", I reply.

You can't make 23.976fps videos with Adobe Premiere.... is no possible. You can do 24fps video... you can do 23.98fps video but damned if you can do 23.976.

So what are your options? Well, we've come up with a fairly good solution to this dilemma. Basically the idea is that you make a slightly faster version of your audio, edit at 24fps in premiere and change the video to 23.976fps later and reattach your original audio.

First off, you've obviously read the guide on IVTC'ing your footage so it's progressive. If you haven't, what they heck are you doing in here? Get out! Go on, shoo!

Changing the Framerate of Your Source

Since you've got AVISynth files at this point which are IVTC'd to be in 23.976fps, the first thing we do is need to make them 24fps so Premiere can deal with them. All you need to do is add this line to the end of your AVISynth script:

AssumeFPS(24)

This will change the framerate of the file without touching the video stream at all by decimating frames or anything like that, which is what we want. Now that our files are in 24fps, you can make your little temporary clips or just open the AVS files up in Premiere and edit away, once you've got your Premiere settings right! Go back and take a look at the Premiere settings guide to make sure you're all setup for 24fps editing. Now you need to fix your audio.

Changing the length of your WAV with BeSweet

OK, you may have seen this program from earlier guides. If not, you need to download BeSweet and the BeSweet GUI from here. Extract them onto a place on your hard disk where you can find them ^_^

Load up the BeSweet GUI and click the folder icon next to BeSweet.exe in the top left corner. Point it to your "besweet.exe" file (not the gui file)

Now, choose the following options on the main page:

Overall Track Adjustments: change frame rate from 23976 to 24000

Note: Old versions of the BeSweet GUI had these the wrong way around. You should end up with a file that is shorter than your original. If you don't; swap them around.

Output: Wave-Stereo

Now select your input and output wav files using the folder and disc icons in the top left corner. It should all end up looking like this:

BeSweet GUI

 

Right, now that's done you can click WAV to WAV.

What this will do is make your song 0.1% faster than it was before (and, hence, a little more high pitched). As 24fps is 0.1% faster than 23.976, we need to speed up our audio for editing. Don't worry about the change though, we'll be using the original audio later once the video has been made so hold onto it.

Now take that new WAV file and stick it on your Premiere timeline (with no gap at the beginning). Edit your video to your heart's content, and then when you're all done, follow the exporting guide with one change: don't bother exporting audio as you will be replacing it anyway.

Now you're ready for the next step!

Getting Back to Normal

The easiest, foolproof way now to get things back the way you want them is to perform two steps. First, use the abcAVI Tag Editor program included in the AMVapp (there is a shortcut in the start menu) and open your newly-exported file.

Go to the Hack/Tweak menu and under 'Video Playback Speed' tick "Force Frames per second"

Enter rate as 23976 and scale as 1000. In the box to the left of these numbers you will see the framerate appear as 23.976. Press Ctrl+S to save these changes.

Now your file's in the framerate it's supposed to be, but it has no audio.

Open up your AVI in VirtualDub. Select "Direct Stream Processing" from the video menu, and also select the same thing in the audio menu if it's not selected already. Then, also under the audio menu, select "WAV Audio" and go find the original, unmodified wave file that you fed into Besweet before. Select it, then under the file menu select "Save AVI" and let it output your new AVI file.

Now your audio should sync up with your video! Use this AVI file when you later encode your video.

Note - yes, adept readers will notice you could've done this all in AVISynth, but it's not quite as foolproof and the AudioDub syntax is messy so we figured this was the safest way. These readers will also notice you could've changed the framerate in VirtualDub, however it would be obvious that they've never done this and then tried to merge two files together. VirtualDub has a bad habit of setting the framerate to random things like 23.97623 instead of 23.97600 and thus if you try to append clips later you'll have to use the tag editor program anyways!

AbsoluteDestiny and ErMaC - October 2002