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Why does MC 2006 need pre-roll on capture?
Why, oh why does Avid need pre-roll to capture?! why can’t it just capture straight through a TC break, and just divide each clip from there? Is there a way to fix this?
It is so frustrating that when capturing tapes into avid it has an error at every TC break. (Media Composer from 2006 – we have various versions, but most are from 2006)
At home I have Premiere from the same year (Premiere Pro) and capturing from my camera, it can capture all the way through a bunch of short clips without stopping, or needing to set pre-roll! WTF
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10 Replies
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Not that I have a direct answer for you but if cam ops could shoot properly to begin with, questions like this would never come up 🙂
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Next your going to expect them to label their tapes or even worse; point the camera at the subject who is speaking.
Scott Davis
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MC does not actually capture the timecode. It just notes the first frame and starts counting from there. It needs some stable preroll to verify frame rate, cadence, etc..
That being said, Avid probably does the best job of dealing with TC breaks of any NLE.
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Can you re-capture a timeline accurately (offline/online workflow) in Premiere after you have captured a tape with TC breaks like that?
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As others wrote, the preroll is needed for Avid to poll the deck over RS422 (or FW), so it can properly determine the starting TC value for the clip.
Without proper preroll, no proper TC is read/calculated. -
set the preroll to nada and set your settings to capture over breaks or capture on the fly after the tc break.
… better yet, shoot without breaking tc.
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Better yet, start shooting with a file based format.
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Well, being that I work at a production company, and they have tight wallets, changing to newer stuff isn’t an option until the old stuff breaks, or fails miserably – for some reason my extra time spent correcting a lousy workflow doesn’t matter much, for now.
I haven’t tried Offline/Online workflow with Premiere as I edit Online raw anyhow, for the time being. But even with Avid, when shot-checking a lot of these shows we do (shot on HDV) I still end up having to adjust many clips a few frames here and there. To me it just seems weird that the deck has to stop at each TC break, rewind, start, pre-roll and then capture – though I guess maybe I don’t know enough to know…
Make sure to check out our website http://www.makeyourfriendsuncomfortable.com
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As a person who has a great deal of experience with onlining for broadcast, I can assure you its definitely not silly. Short or no preroll in offline can cause all kinds of timecode slippage and wreak havoc on an online.
Your experience with HDV does not surprise me (especially if its via Firewire control), as in general, the HDV decks are not as good as “broadcast” formats like Digibeta and HDCAM. (Yeah, I know HDV is used in broadcast all the time….just sayin’) You are pretty much guaranteed to have some slippage no matter what.
Doesn’t sound like this is applicable to your situation anyway…but as you put you, you don’t know what you don’t know.
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Isn’t there a Digitize Across Timecode Breaks checkbox on your Capture Settings>General tab?
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