-
Mojo, rented digibeta and blackburst
Dumb question but need to make sure I actually need a blackburst for my particular setup.
We have a rented digibeta machine and are capturing 1:1 through our mojo. It is giving us the error message,
“A video sync signal has not been detected from the capture source. This can cause time code drift for long clips. Please make sure your blackburst generator is connected to all decks and any V-LAN/VLXi routers”
I’m assuming all this means is it wants a blackburst generator, yada yada yada. Here we have a rented deck and were planning on being done with this deck and this direct to DVD project very soon. In our case, is it worth it to run out and buy a blackburst or will we be severely hurting later.
-
6 Replies
-
You should be fine without a blackburst generator. Unless you are doing a digital cut back to tape, your timecode in when digitizing will remain in sync with your video. Make sure that you switch your mojo to internal reference. This should be in your video input dialogue box.
-
So what exactly does the blackburst generator do?
-
It generates an analog compostite signal of… well, black. This rock solid steady stream of sync pulses feeds into all of your connected equipment and provide a common heart beat for them to follow.
Keep in mind that a VTR is a dynamic spinning ball of balistic unsteadiness. The built-in TBC (Time Base Corrector) takes care of this unsteady stream of video and tames in into a constant stream of video/data. If you provide a sync reference (Black Burst) then the TBC will force the VTR’s output signal to conform to this incoming “heart beat”.
If you connect this same reference to the Mojo, it too will conform to the common “heart beat”. This will gurantee that the deck doesn’t get to far ahead or behind the Mojo. If the two drift more than a frames worth of time apart from each other, you will drop or duplicate a frame.
You can use any analog composite video signal you have lying around for reference, as long as it is rock solid consistent. For example, the video output of a professional camera.
-
[Paul Carlin] “a VTR is a dynamic spinning ball of balistic unsteadiness”
That’s hilarious! Kinda’ describes my mornings…
Jon
-
We also have several regular beta sp decks that we own. If we were to do any editing with those (both capturing from and then printing to tape) through the mojo then would you recommend we get a blackburst?
-
You should have the ‘burst if you are planning to do any “insert” edits on your BetaSp decks… (prevents horizontal shifting) as mentioned above… As an option, you could feed the composite output from the Digi-beta into the mojo sync input to force the mojo into sync with d-beta (don’t know if it would work, but worth a try)
Just a thought
Randy
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up