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DV Start/stop with Panasonic AJ-HDX900 + AJ-HD1400
Hi, does anyone know for certain whether FCP 7’s DV start/stop detection can be made to work with HD (1080i50 25PsF) media shot on an AJ-HDX900 and captured via firewire using FCP’s default DVCPro HD settings, from an AJ-HD1400 VTR?
I have spent the last 10 months editing a 15-part TV series (200+ DVCPro HD tapes) and due to not being able to make this work, have been using Scene Detector (with extremely mixed results) to optically detect scenes and then manually amend the results in FCP before sub-clipping the media before editing, which has been a very laborious and time-consuming task.
It looks likely that we will not have budget to move to a tapeless workflow for next year (a new series, with up to 25 hour-long shows, with 350+ tapes), so would appreciate anyone’s insight into whether scene detection is possible with this media in FCP 7. Incidentally, FCP’s manual indicates that DV start/stop should work with all DV formats including DVCPro HD captured via firewire, but I’ve had no joy. I’ve been told it is a camera ‘user-bits’ settings option that differentiates camera starts/stops based on time-of-day (ToD) user-bit data, but can find little to no reference as to how to set this up on the camera or VTR…though it seems that recording free-run timecode is also a prerequisite. If anyone has any experience of this, please let me know…
Thanks,
Oli
Oli da Costa
Fraktiv Post Production
London W1 -
2 Replies
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I would avoid free run timecode at all costs, if that is what it takes to do scene detection. There may be better software out there to do this, so I recommend searching this forum if you haven’t already as I know this has been discussed before.
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Hi Michael, thanks for the reply. We actually tried free-run on 2 of this year’s shows and both FCP and I hated it, so I can say that I fully agree with your opinion. However, I’m yet to find any software that performs better than Scene Detector, which wasn’t great to start with. I’ve tried quite a few, including CatDV and ReCut, and while ReCut was marginally better, it’s way of marking detected cuts and feeding this back to FCP was far inferior to Scene Detector. I’ve tried some other Mac and PC utilities too, but many were simply unusable for workflow reasons. Hence, I’m a bit stuck!
If I were able to nail a way to use rec-run on the camera, with some UB/ToD setting or other, and have FCP’s DV start/stop work properly – as it says it should – I’d be a happy man!
Oli da Costa
Fraktiv Post Production
London W1
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