IO LA w/Sony 1800 – Need blackburst gen for consistent TC?

[Chris Poisson]

Primelight,

I don’t know about the LA, but I had a Decklink hooked up to my 1800 for two years, and I was looping the “Y” cable through the Ref input and it was stable and reliable, but this wouldn’t work anymore when I went to a Kona LH. A blackburst generator was the perfect solution. I do edit to tape and it hits the mark perfectly every time. Get one.

Have a wonderful day.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Horita BSG-50, that’s right, BSG-50. 1800’s need sync like bears need honey.

How far off is your timecode? Maybe the settings are off on your deck and your set up for freerun instead of regen timecode? Are you doing an assemble edit? Did you run a little heads with heads/tails before and after the time you want your timecode to start? YOu don’t have to black & code the whole tape, just the beginning. If you want your timecode to start at 1:00:00:00 then black and code starting at 59:40:00, run the tape past the 1 hour mark, then tell FCP to assemble at the one hour make. You should also calculate your frame offset for dead nuts accurate timecode.

[Tom Matthies]

FCP will not output timecode to your deck running with RS-422 control. The code you get on your dub will be whatever value the time code generator was last left at, or zero if you have just powered the deck up. If you need matching code on your tapes, you will have to pre-stripe (black) a tape at the correct time code. As mentioned above, you will not have to black the entire tape. Just pre-stripe enough to get you into your program material and then do an “assemble” edit at the proper time. I always build my timeline as self contained with bars/tone, slate countdown and extra black at the tail, especially when doing an assemble edit. I have a Sony UWV-100 and an Io LA and it works just fine doing this.
And…a black reference for all your equipment is the way to go.
Tom

[Primelight]

Thanks for all your responses. I did black the first couple of minutes and did Edit to Tape and it worked fine. I did find that it’s not frame accurate which one of the posts seem to indicate. If I figure the offset will it be consistent from now on? And if I get the Horita gen do I need the BSG-50 or BG-50?

Thanks again.

don

FCP 4.5
Dual 2 Gig
Ram 2 Gig
Sony 1800
DSR-11
Internal 250 gig
G-Raid 500
G-Drive 160

[Jeremy Garchow]

The BSG-50, that’s right the BSG-50.

If you calculate the frame offset, it should be accurate everytime. What you need to do is match your timeline timecode to the tape timecode. For instance, Stripe a Beta from 59:40:00 to over one hour. Create a sequence in FCP (could be anything, a matte color, text, whatever). Do an edit to tape assemble edit telling FCP to start at 1:00:00:00. Lay off ten seconds of media. Look at the footage frame by frame on the tape. If the media started at 01:00:00:04, then you have a 4 frame offset (a value of -4 should be entered in the tc offset to start fcp sending video 4 frames early, thus overcoming the offset/delay).

Then repeat the process and you’ll see that FCP should now be in sync with your deck.

Jeremy

You can calculate the incoming frame offset by digitizing the “super” in of your beta deck and compare it to the tc in FCP.

———–
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