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Can we perhaps hold the triumphalism …?
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[Oliver Peters] “Except that GPS is not human readable unless you mean only the clock signal. Then there is no correlation to frames – only fractions of seconds.”
And for Jeremy’s example, it assumes that the GPS-based “faux” timecode-substitute is preserved through rendering. You’re not dealing directly with sources. It’s going to take some work for manufacturers to recognize GPS as metadata that needs to be preserved, OR to create NEW renders that ALSO include GPS data.
I don’t know about you, but my computer isn’t tied to GPS in any way I’m aware of….and unless the GPS in my computer that I don’t know about is polling on a MUCH more frequent basis than my computer’s clock is polling the atomic servers, there’s still no way to account for drift.
(AFAIK, the location-based services in my computer are tied to my IP address, and you only need to look at where various websites think you’re logged in to see how very nearly useless this is.)
Talk about a kludge!!! Timecode works not because it’s archaic, but because it WORKS. EVERYONE knows how to deal with, because it WORKS. No satellites, no new development effort, and no turning yourself inside out for a function as basic as repurposing a previous edit.
Ironically, the further down this route we go, the less elegantly Apple-like it becomes, and the more like a clueless Microsoft approach that makes every possible wrong assumption about how things work. LOL I say as someone working more frequently on Windows than not.
Simplicity is a virtue. Time is linear, even if editing is not. It’s not that I NEED time to work the same it always has. It’s that time DOES work the way it always has, which is why workflows around it are currently so stable. There are not only no advantages to moving to GPS for post, there are only disadvantages, even on a timeline that refutes the idea of time or its own nature as a timeline. The SOURCES rely on time, and no amount of kludging can change that….
….and no amount of insistence on modernity for its own sake or new-fangled satellites can change the fact that it’s a kludge at the far end of the spectrum of inelegance and difficulty the further down the post pipeline you move.
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[Bill Davis] “Presuming the GPS time signal is embedded into the footage in exactly the same way 00:00:00:00 based timecode is today – it’s going to do you precisely the same good that VITC and tape track based timecode did back in the day. There’s literally NO functional difference if the camera manufacturers support it.”
So instead of a quartz crystal inside the camera driving the clock to generate the TC there is a GPS receiver inside the camera driving the clock to generate the TC? I think the GPS idea is nifty and could be a nice addition to what already exists (possibly an alternative to things like LockIt boxes), but I don’t see as being an either/or situation (GPS *or* Quartz). I feel like this is a recurring question in this forum, but what’s wrong with having multiple options since the breadth and scope of production and post production is so broad?
[Bill Davis] “Are you saying that modern timepieces lose accuracy if they aren’t hooked up to a reliable constant timing source?”
Yes.
According to this watch enthusiast site, your typical quartz clock can drift between 2 seconds (worst case scenario) and 1/10th of a second per day (best case scenario) depending on quality of the components, wear on the components, and environmental factors (heat, humidity, etc.,) (https://www.chronocentric.com/watches/accuracy.shtml).
And here’s a link from a blog at B&H talking about syncing cameras and second system sound. Drift can start happening inside of 30min and I’ve personally seen it happen inside of an hour. I’ve also seen gear jam synced in the morning and by the afternoon they weren’t that far off so how quickly and how much can change on a case by case basis.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/video/tips-and-solutions/timecode-versus-sync-how-they-differ-and-why-it-matters#comments[Bill Davis] “Perhaps on location in the middle of nowhere. But even there, there are satellite radios and other mobile GPS readers that can grab a reset signal from a satellite, so I’m just not worried about it. “
Think more like a structure/environment that blocks the signal (inside a building, a tunnel, a canyon, etc.,). So what’s plan B if you are shooting in a place where you can’t get a GPS signal or the signal might not be reliable? Hopefully the A/V gear still supports TC the ‘old fashioned’ way and has it’s own internal clocks and/or can accept a signal from a local source. Maybe there is a way for the internal clocks to keep going on their own until the GPS signal comes back, but what happens if the internal clocks have already started to drift even just a hair? Will they ‘snap’ back in sync with the GPS signal and possibly cause a break in the TC? Is the lesser of two evils just to keep going on the internal clocks (even if that means drifting out of sync) until someone yells ‘cut’ and then the link to the GPS signal can be reestablished?
I have a Garmin GPS bike computer and it loses contact with the satellites if I go under a freeway overpass and it takes forever to get a signal if it’s sitting in my garage. Smartphones use the cell networks and WiFi alongside GPS signals so even if they lose the satellites they have something to try and fall back on. My Garmin also only poles the GPS satellite every three seconds I think in order to save battery life (it has low power black and white screen and one charge will last about 8hrs). I was also reading about a new GPS watch by Seiko and it can only get GPS signals if it can ‘see the sky’.
Keeping a single watch or clock from drifting a second here or there by occasionally updating it with a GPS signal seems much less complicated than keeping multiple pieces of A/V gear in perfect lockstep down to 1/60, 1/120, etc., of a second.
These are more rhetorical type questions because I know we aren’t engineers, but if it requires a GPS signal to work I think the first natural question is, “Well what happens if there is no GPS signal?” If the whole model hinges on always having an unbroken link to the GPS signal I don’t think it sounds very robust or practical.
[Bill Davis] “Has nothing to do with frame identification for editing. If the clock time is right to GPS standards, Math can convert it into whatever division you’re working with. It’s pretty basic. “
But it does. Different frame rates for PAL and NTSC countries were chosen for various technical reasons and a few decades later someone pondered, “Hey, anyone think it would be useful if video frames could be numbered like pages in a book?”. Whether the TC is generated from an internal clock, from an external box or from a GPS satellite I still have to worry about flickering lights if I mismatch frame rate and local power frequency.
So, if I’m following you, If I’m in an NTSC country, for example, I’ll still shoot 60p and if I’m in a PAL country I’ll still shoot 50p but instead of using an internal clock for TC (or something like a Lockit Box for syncing multiple pieces of gear) the camera(s)/audio gear will rely on a GPS signal for accurate time keeping and then convert the time from the GPS signal into the correct frame rate?
[Bill Davis] ” And simply LESS useful today because the systems are changing and cameras have superb on-board timekeeping that’s cheap and widely available “
Less useful to who? You? Me? Oliver? Everyone?
[Bill Davis] “Now you’re just being silly.”
All I did was rephrase your question.
[Bill Davis] “that everyone HAS to keep thinking that timecode needs to continue to be dealt with like it was in 1979. “
Who said that? Some of us are just trying to figure out why it’s necessary to blow up ‘A’ in order to have ‘B’? I’m not seeing how having an internal clock, syncing externally to a local clock and syncing via a GPS time signal are mutually exclusive technologies? They seem more complimentary than competing to me.
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[Andrew Kimery] “Who said that? Some of us are just trying to figure out why it’s necessary to blow up ‘A’ in order to have ‘B’? I’m not seeing how having an internal clock, syncing externally to a local clock and syncing via a GPS time signal are mutually exclusive technologies? They seem more complimentary than competing to me.”
Ultimately it doesn’t really matter how you create the identifier, as long as you have an identifier. The advantage of timecode currently is threefold: synchronization, timing, and identification of a specific location within the material.
As I said in a previous post in some thread, the combo of a 4-digit identifier (reel iD or other) plus TC gives me the ability to access any individual unique frame within 10,000 hours of material. If I up that by 24 hours per 4-digit reel ID, that goes up to 240,000 hours. Currently that system works quite well. If there’s a better system, that’s fine. I’m not sure GPS is it.
In the film days it was feet+frames and for film editors that system worked well. Given the nature of film stock, that info could be embedded as both human-readable numbers, as well as machine-readable bar code. Clearly that same approach could have worked in the world of video, but timecode won out.
Right now and for the foreseeable future, valid timecode and the ability to read it is very, very important to nearly all productions. Anything I work on where this info is ignored or mishandled ends up being problematic. And that applies to low budget local commercials and corporate videos just as much as high-end projects.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Andrew Kimery] “They seem more complimentary than competing to me.
“If in fact GPS is practical, and it’s simply not always. Heck, if your devices are polling at different times, they may FORCE themselves out of sync with other devices.
And how might you force them to sync simultaneously? With time of day.
There’s no getting around that this is an overlay of demonstrable occasional uselessness.
I don’t understand why we’re even talking about this. LOL It’s extra expense and complication, and will require a LOT more development to be practical on location…
…and still doesn’t properly address the everyday POST scenario of pulling an edit from somebody else’s edit, and how to update the sub-edit when the master changes. Your computer would need to rendering with GPS info to be useful for anyone downstream, which, indoors, is virtually impossible to do predictably.
FCPX should be doing this kind of thing in its sleep, managing iterations up and down stream. It’s exactly the kind of thing that a magnetic timeline SHOULD be doing…and the hardest, most complicated way to do it, with the least possible reliability, is GPS.
Actually, a sundial would be less useful, but that’s about it. LOL
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[Bill Davis] “So you lose nothing and gain a lot.
IF we can overcome the inertia of “that’s how TC works and always has – so don’t mess with it.”
“I literally think we are having different conversations on timecode.
However you want to keep track of time, GPS or otherwise, it’d be nice if fcpx could display multiple instances of time on any clip, in any given Project, simultaneously.
FCPX demonsrates some of this capability in multiclips, it’d be nice if the Viewer had the same capability.
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But let me ask you this. When you export a movie from an NLE, and the timecode is stamped via GPS, how do you know what timecode to write? Exports never happen in real time, they are either faster or slower.
Also, if GPS timecode is extremely accurate, say down to milliseconds, how do you stop separate elements/recorders from writing different milliseconds and not being able to lock to each other in post since the tc is discontinuous?
If you want to change the tc world, get rid of fractional frame rates in ‘NTSC’.
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Not specifically responding to Tim but why is everyone trying to make this so hard? Right now I can and have mixed IPhone (no SMPTE but YES global clock time sync, with Canon C-100 footage that runs SMPTE but ALSO runs time of day. I import both AND DSLR footage AND footage from a 3rd or 4th camera and everything works just fine. FCP X doesn’t CARE if the sources ALL have SMPTE or not. The software applies TC to ALL the working footage and I can edit it (and presumably AVID and Premiere Pro TOO) whether or not it arrived stamped the way an engineer or any of you like. That’s progress. I don’t have to pre-stripe and black a tape the way I did when I was 25 and learning editing. It’s gotten better. You all appear to believe that unless the industry adheres to house clock forever the sky will fall (it won’t) and you’ll lose something you have now (I don’t believe you will.)
My argument is NOT to take something away from you. If GoPro can do this (keep time with real time via a WiFi back) then a camera 10 times the size and weight can too. That’s just a fact.
You all get to KEEP what you have.
I just don’t get why you all have your imaginary panties in a twist at the concept of BETTER clock time capabilities in new cameras so we don’t HAVE to work with SMPTE if it doesn’t suit us.
My phone can keep accutlrate time. My watch can talk to my phone and keep accurate too.
That my camera that cost orders of magnitude more than either device can’t as well just seems … stupid.
That’s all. -
[Bill Davis] “That my camera that cost orders of magnitude more than either device can’t as well just seems … stupid.
That’s all.”Well, no argument there. LOL But that doesn’t make it less true. LOL
[Bill Davis] “(I don’t believe you will.)”
I don’t know why you’re not taking the word of people who are. We all work differently. Have we not at least established that much? Jeremy’s example is very much from the real world. It’s not imaginary.
And GPS isn’t better. It’s not just worse. It’s untenable, in any real or imagined world, unless your imagined world has GPS that works indoors, or a computer that does GPS at all.
Maybe some day all of this will come to pass. Until it does, the reports of the real-world experiences of other FCPX enthusiasts are as valid as yours. Your insistence that it isn’t isn’t moving the conversation, or the industry, forward imo.
Although hey, I might be as wrong about this as I am everything else. LOL Five years ago in April, even before it was released, I’m the one who insisted that FCPX adoption would be 10 times higher than FCP by the end of the first year, or, if it was me in charge, I’d fire everyone on the marketing team. LOL
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[Bill Davis] “Right now I can and have mixed IPhone (no SMPTE but YES global clock time sync, with Canon C-100 footage that runs SMPTE but ALSO runs time of day.”
Huh? That time of day code is still SMTPE timecode. Just because it’s time of day doesn’t change the technical criteria of the signal.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Bill Davis] “If GoPro can do this (keep time with real time via a WiFi back) then a camera 10 times the size and weight can too. That’s just a fact. “
That GoPro code is useless in real complex productions, which aren’t just perishable, short turnaround projects.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “That GoPro code is useless in real complex productions, which aren’t just perishable, short turnaround projects.
“That’s just the old way of thinking Oliver 🙂
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