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Black Magic HDCAM capture issue, pulling out hair, please help!?
My director and I are having serious issues capturing HDCAM tapes successfully in FCP log and capture on his quad core 2.0 mac pro with 6 gigs of ram onto an internal SATA drive (not the boot drive) with plenty of free space available, jh3 deck and Blackmagic Decklink HD Pro card into any format. We seem to be able to capture 2 or 3 clips (when there are TC breaks I have it set to start a new clip) successfully and properly but then on the third it usually gives us the error message saying there’s something wrong with our VTR and not to eject the tape and then says that frames were dropped during capture – sometimes it only capture for 10 seconds or so, others it’ll capture ~3 clips. We were on fcp 5.1.4 but then tried 6.0.1 with no luck either.
The plan was to go from the HDCAM tapes shot on a Sony F900 @ 24fps into the Blackmagic and then capture at “BLACKMAGIC HDTV 1080PsF 24 – DVCPRO HD” to convert on the fly, but that wasn’t working. Again, the clips that do capture look pristine and all of the frames seem captured correctly but it can’t do more than 2 clips or so. I’ve checked the files and their size is correct for the DVCPRO HD format so it’s not like we’re accidentally capturing uncompressed HD or something. SO, then we tried using the Blackmagic “Deck Control” software to try something new – we can successfully capture entire tapes to DVCPRO HD using this software but it doesn’t do TC, can’t detect TC breaks so it’s not breaking the tape up into clips and when I bring in the clips to FCP to check the item properties etc. it lists DVCPRO HD 60i 24 fps – the “Deck Control” software doesn’t give us too many options so this is what it defaulted to.
I feel like I’m going crazy… am I missing something? You can capture on the fly from a JH3 through a Blackmagic Decklink Pro HD card onto a non-raided internal SATA drive using a DVCPRO HD or Prores as your compression, correct? We have tried every setting everywhere known to man in FCP log and capture, easy setups, audio / video settings etc., updated to the newest version of the drivers for Blackmagic, tried different tapes, tried capturing to an external FW800 raid0 drive, tried setting the deck to both 23.98 and 24 modes, restarted the deck and computer many times – I don’t understand what is causing this issue? Could it be some weird compatibility thing with his intel chip mac pro? Should we try it in my tried and true dual core 2.3 G5 (2.5 gigs of ram)?
Any help, greatly appreciated –
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8 Replies
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[Bryan R] “am I missing something? You can capture on the fly from a JH3 through a Blackmagic Decklink Pro HD card onto a non-raided internal SATA drive using a DVCPRO HD or Prores as your compression, correct?”
Not in my experience. If you did it would be very rare and likely inconsistent.
You need some kind of Raid to capture HD footage (except HDV which you can do over fw)
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So this is the issue? I need faster drives to capture to DVCPRO HD on the fly? When I was first listing my system specs in a post on this forum and what I planned to capture to (4 internal SATA drives non-raided) the response was that I’d only need to Raid if I was onlining but capturing offline DVCPRO HD files etc. was fine… so I need to run down to Fry’s and buy a couple internal SATA drives, Raid0 them through OSX software and then it should capture correctly? Has anyone here captured DVCPRO HD or a comparable offline HD format from HDCAM through a Blackmagic card to a single SATA drive successfully?
Thanks again, as always…
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Try going into your tapes and selecting in and out points rather than the method you’re using. Make sure that your In point is 6 seconds past your time code breaks. FCP is very finicky about time code. It drives us nuts sometimes. We have had this problem with tapes shot with time of day time code. This is why we roll 6-8 seconds before “Action”.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut Pro systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck -
Thanks Steve,
Though I was really trying to avoid this method so there wouldn’t be excessive wear and tear on these master HDCAM tapes jogging back and forth to set ins and outs – I know when there is a TC break that it locates the TC break for you which is some back and forth but it seems like just to set the ins and outs would a lot of jogging around on our master tapes…
Were you capturing to single SATA drives or a raid setup?
Thanks!
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[Bryan R] “excessive wear and tear on these master HDCAM tapes jogging back and forth”
Don’t even give that a thought. Sony selected 1/2″ tape for HDCAM because they are tough enough to take it. Back when we edited tape to tape, in the previous century, we would shuttle those tapes for hours at a time. In fact, if you look into the specs on tape decks, you shouldn’t leave VHS in pause for more tham 8 minutes, for HDCAM, it’s something like 23 hours. Something that a lot of people don’t know is that you should never load or eject a tape that isn’t wound to one end or the other because that is when they get scratched.
In the field, our shot logger grabs TC on “action”, not “roll camera”. Then, she grabs TC at “cut”, knowing that we roll tape for three more seconds. Then, in post, we enter TC from the sheet or an electronic tape log.
Those tapes and tape heads can take it. That’s why the decks and tapes cost so much. That and the fact that they know that they have us over a barrel and can stick it to us. It’s funny how BetaSP was $1 a minute until we didn’t need it anymore. Now, we can buy BetaSP 30s or $9. Just like our F-900s that cost $102K until they had competition.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut Pro systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck -
Steve,
Interesting to know, thanks for the info. Honestly I haven’t handled tape stock for capturing in quite some time since most of what I’ve worked on in the past couple years is handled by assistants and I just usually entered to prepped edit bays OR I’m delivered hard drives – so it takes me back to when I was editing my own short films on miniDV etc. and those things were pretty weak stock it seemed so I’ve been wary of handling and shuttling tape stock since the olden days 🙂
Well it seems we were able to resolve our capture issues but we’re still not exactly sure where the problem was exactly. We reinstalled the old drivers that came with the Decklink HD Pro and that seems to work now – though strangely enough we can’t see any video on the preview window while capturing but once the tape finishes, the clips have been captured perfectly with TC etc. and all is well (oh, and they capture fine onto a single internal SATA drive). It seems like FCP 5 and his macpro and this capture card and deck just didn’t work well together. FCP 6 now works for capturing but the newest drivers from Decklink didn’t work properly but the old ones that came packaged with the card do… uh so, wish I could impart some knowledge onto others from what we learned but I’m not sure what I can gather from all of this. I still have a feeling if we would have been on my G5, all would have been well, everything runs so reliably on it…
Thanks everyone!
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I can’t speak to the Blackmagic issue as we use the Kona 3 cards, but are you sure the tape was shot at 24 and not 23.98 It’s rare that someone would chose to shoot at 24 without a very specific reason. 23.98 is much more common. You may be dropping frames due to the computer trying to calculated a 24 frame speed from 23.98 material. Just a thought.
We capture DVCPro HD from HDCAM to a GRAID all the time. No need for fast drives in that scenario.Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
The plan is for a film out – so I could only assume they wanted to shoot at the same frame rate as film for a better film out workflow? We initially tried capturing at 23.98 with the same results anyways…
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