Matching up Masters to Screener files in documentary?

Matchbox
#1

Hi, I’m trying to see if Matchbox can help me with my documentary project. It utilizes a lot of old television footage that was provided to us via screeners from ESPN. Now they’ve sent along masters that I thought were only going to be for the clips we needed with a couple seconds handles but in some cases they’ve sent 10 minute (or more) stretches that contain several clips we need, but there is no embedded timecode that syncs up to the original screener timecode so matching them up has been extremely time consuming.

Visually they’re nearly identical minus the printed timecode on the screeners. I was hoping Matchbox could help me identify the clips used in the film from these long master files, but I couldn’t even really test it because the film frame rate is 23.98, the screener footage came to us at 29.97, and the master footage is 59.94. Is there anything I can do to have Matchbox help with this process short of re-rendering every huge master file at 23.98 or 29.97?

#2

Yeah, with different framerates you have a mess for sure.
Even if you transcode the smaller one as a test, you will probably find the frame interpolation is done differently to the way it was done in the other video stream - so it won’t actually be the same sequence of frames in the same order.

But it’s worth a shot for sure. transcoding the 59.94 down to 29.97 would be the most reliable route I think. But try it the other way on one short clip and see how it goes.

You then have the challenge of taking the range that Matchbox finds, and converting them to 23.98. I have an idea… get in touch over email and we can try something.