I just completed a project that required a video clip to be sent to the University of Massachusetts Boston (www.umb.edu) for streaming from their online learning servers. It's easy enough to produce a Quicktime H.264 clip. But then the catch - they needed it at the NTSC frame rate of 29fps and an NTSC DV frame size of 720x480 pixels. Here in sunny South Africa we use 25fps and I work in 1080i HD resolutions which are 1920x1080 pixels.

I love little technical challenges like these.

I tried a number of software conversion solutions but because for the difference between 25fps and 29fps the video and audio remained out of sync. The solution came from the usual source of post-production wisdom: the Avid Community Forums.

Someone once told me "share what you know and learn what you don't", so here's the workflow:

1) Edit the original 25fps footage in a 1080i/50 HD project

2) Start a new project for the conversion, this time 30i NTSC

3) Now import the 25fps sequence from the original project into a bin in the NTSC project. Now the magic part - just double click the sequence to open it and Avid will do the frame rate conversion for you.


In this case the original 25fps was adjusted by 83% to keep in sync with the audio playing back at 29fps.
 

All that remains is to export a Quicktime H.264 file and FTP to the client. I did notice some softening of the image but this was easily fixed by an unsharp mask filter and a full render of the Fluidmotion effect.

Quick and easy!