Help: Viewer timecode differences

[Colin Mcquillan]

[William Shand] ”
Eventually I noticed that the two “Viewer” windows on each computer varied slightly with their time codes. On one computer the time code turns over to 0 after it reaches 23 milliseconds, and the other after it reaches 29.
“

Perhaps by milliseconds you mean frames?
Sounds like the project settings on one are set for 24fps and the other 30fps(29.97)

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver, B.C.

[John Fishback]

Make sure your capture settings match the source frame rate.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870
ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
24″ TV-Logic Monitor
Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[William Shand]

Yeah I managed to fix that up quite quickly once I figured out, but sadly it seems I misdiagnosed the problem.

My capture settings match both the EDL and the source, but for some reason I’m always a random number of frames out upon capturing the footage. It seems like a time code issue but I can’t track down anything wrong.

For example I’ll batch capture a scene and the first shot be 5 frames out at the “in” point and 2 frames out on the “out” point according to my source time code and by looking at the video you can see it doesn’t match up. If I manually change the time code to match my source everything syncs up perfectly.

So it basically seems like Final Cut is simply choosing not to capture the scenes to match the specifications of the EDL. Right now I’m using a Panasonic AJ-HD130DC DVCPRO to recapture, using Final Cut version 5.1.4. with a 23.98 720p source.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[John Pale]

Was there a standard def offline done at 29.97 and the HD footage for online is 23.98?

If so, you need to convert the EDL to 23.98 before capture (Cinema Tools).

Why are you using an EDL anyway….what system was the offline done on?

[William Shand]

The SD footage is also 23.98 so I’m not sure what the conflict is. I’ve checked over all the possible time code issues that could arise and nothing appears to be different.

I’m an idiot and there’s next to no reason for me to be using an EDL, I tried using an XML though and had the exact same results.

No matter what though the time code always appears randomly off. Could the fact that the footage was shot on old tapes that were not properly cleared beforehand and have broken time code throw things off? (I just found out that this had occured)