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Bringing Timecode into the 21st Century ;-)
Hi
“Recognizing that innovations in digital acquisition and post have rendered the nearly 40-year-old approach to video time code obsolete, the process for defining a 21st-century standard for time code is well underway in SMPTE.”https://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/currentissue/10011.html
And black-burst synchronisation.
“We need to specify how the new time label gets incorporated into the MXF package right from the outset. If we do that, we provide a lot more robustness in what goes through production and post production so you’re not continually trying to do a virtual clapboard to find out which elements really do live together…
…we’ve got a lot of the major players on board. It’s important to socialize this, particularly in Hollywood and the other major post centers, to make sure we’re interacting. If there is somebody else looking at this that we don’t know about and thinking about proprietary solutions, please come talk to us. We think we have good ideas and we’ve got most of the major equipment players on board. It’s to everybody’s benefit to have this done via a standardized solution.
Anybody know if Apple’s Infinite Loop is a part of this – Silicon Valley not being Hollywood as far as us Brits understand geography. 😉
(My bold emphasis)
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7 Replies
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Dave
funny being that your at a tv station 🙂
you actually answered your own question: why not make NTSC 30 instead of 29.97? cuz in less than 4 months there will be no NTSC.
NTSC is an analog standard. Basically the digital standard aka ATSC sez you can transmit in any frame rate you want cuz the receivers are made to handle it!
so its more like, is the NBC Network Feed 1080i 29.97 or 1080i 30?
how about ABC at 720p? 29.97? 30.00? 60.00?
dont blame SMPTE, point a nice big “shame on you finger” at Sony and Panasonic! they got us into this mess!
Dont get me wrong, i am right there with you on this front! i hate all this 29.97 23.95 whatever the f***!!!
btw, i read a blog somewhere about why railroad tracks are 4 and 3/4 feet wide. It goes back to the first roman road, as that was the wheel width of the carts, which were made that wide to accomadate two horses side by side, or 2 horses a””es!
some things just do not change!
It will be some va
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
[Bob Flood] “btw, i read a blog somewhere about why railroad tracks are 4 and 3/4 feet wide. It goes back to the first roman road, as that was the wheel width of the carts, which were made that wide to accomadate two horses side by side, or 2 horses a””es!
some things just do not change!”
you do realize that Russian, German and Spanish railways all have differing widths?
(at least around world war 2 they did, this prevented nazi trains from coming into certain places) -
Hi
Whist I hear your cry, that is in effect a mere detail… 🙁Regardless of the actual frame rate, there has been a lack of VITC-like identity-stamping of every frame since tape was eliminated from the editing/post-production workflow.
Frame-stamping is absolutely essential – so the NLE asset database (even more absolutely essential) can recognise footage after its been fragmented by the editing process.Hitherto the blind-grunt power of computers to do incredibly (mindlessly) boring addition/subtraction processes which create innumerable frame-offset lists – to keep track of the overall edit-decision operation – and render it all into dumb XML project files, has kept the creaky-leaky good ship NLE afloat.
What’s needed going forward – into the sunlight 64-bit tundra of the snow leopard – is a QuickTime/FCS code-base that accommodates:
a) Fundamental, powerful, database structures – to replace inadequate XML project structures, and
b) Powerful frame-based metadata structures to identify all assets, at every stage of any process being applied to any fragment of the larger file.
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[Bob Flood] “i hate all this 29.97 23.95 whatever the f***!!!”
I am soooooooo glad I only work in PAL..
-Simmie
4 MacPros – Kona 3 & Kona LH
2 G5s – Kona LH
xbox360, Wii, PSP, PS2
https://www.speak.co.uk -
Chris
oh yeah! (russias like 5 1/2 feet!)
so does that mean they had fatter horses? or maybe horses with fatter a**es?
btw there is a train that runs from paris to madrid, i think, and when it reaches the border, they Literally pick up each car off of the european gauge wheels, and put them on the spanish guage wheels. With passengers aboard! at night!
kinda like a teranex!
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
hey paul
i dont know how much of your comment this addresses, but one thing i would like to see, and the guy spearheading this committee has said so as well, is a form of “time coding” that address variable frame rate acquisition, both digitally and photographically ie film, so when you shoot over-crank or under-crank , you have an accurate index of the media, so when my overcranked dailies come back at 24, and i want to re transfer at 30, or 60, i dont have to calculate all the offsets!
as an analogy, like a flag in the code that sez “i was shot at 300 fps” and this gets translated to the same values all the time, regardless of transfer or copying speed
sounds somewhat selfish i know, but what the heck?
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
[Bob Flood] “sounds somewhat selfish i know, but what the heck? “
Hi
Not at all… That’s what metadata should be all about.QuickTime re-wrapped files brought into FCP via Log & Transfer can acquire all sorts of clip/project metadata that couldn’t get included by the older Log & Capture – Cocoa versus Carbon coding presumably?
All that Apple needs to do is get all the native camera-created MXF metadata to come across as well – which presumably requires a Cocoa rewrite of QuickTime.
AND for camera next-generation time/identity/properties stamping (= new SMPTE timecode) to be seen by Apple’s software for what is is, not incompatible with QuickTime’s way of doing it…
Hopefully this is all well in hand, as part of the Snow Leopard ‘optimisation’ scenario.
Otherwise we’re doomed (60s British TV series catch-phrase) 🙁
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