onlyAVID can read tc written on audio channel?!????

[Bret Williams]

You’re probably right. But I gotta ask why you had to put the TC on the audio track these days.

[Wayne Orr]

To answer Brett’s question first; the reason to put tc on an audio track is to have accurate tc between multiple cameras and/or a DAT recorder. There is no external “tc in” available on this camera, as there is with the Canon for “jam sync”, so you need to get the tc from an external source, such as a Denecke device (denecke.com), which attaches to the camera with Velcro (or whatever) and feeds the external tc to the audio track.

As for Dannie’s question; unfortunately I don’t know if FCP can read this tc off the audio trak, similar to Avid, but if you don’t get an answer here, you might contact Location Sound in North Hollywood, CA and ask them for help. I know they are supplying Denecke gear to productions that are using this method of shooting, for example, “Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. They use a couple of Panasonic DVX100A’s.

I did this a number of years ago on my Media100 system, and it required renting a tc reader, which burned in visible code to my offline material. After cutting the offline with the visible code, I redigitized and assembled the online version. Very easy and pretty bulletproof, unless you don’t want to do the burn-in, which I guess the Avid eliminates. A timecode reader is very inexpensive and easy to hook-up.

HTH
Wayne Orr

[Sean Oneil]

Dannie, I don’t know why you would want or need to record sound to a DAT. Any modern video camera records 48khz digital – the same quality as a DAT. That said, there are other situations where you need to put TC on an audio track.

I just cut a concert and ran into this issue. It was shot on five Varicams, plus a 6th camera which was HDV. The HDV camera doesn’t have TC in, so they put it on an audio track of the camera instead.

FCP does not support this directly like Avid does. FCP only reads TC from 9-pin or Firewire. Luckily there is a gadget that will take the TC from an audio track and places the TC on a 9-pin serial deck control. Thus allowing you to read the TC with Final Cut. Sorry but I forget what it’s called. Search this forum because I found out about it here at the cow.

Instead of buying it myself, I used an annoying workaround. I dubbed all of the camera tapes to Digibeta whilst plugging the AUDIO OUT from the camera into the TC IN on the beta deck. This added a real TC track. Then I captured both the digibeta and the HDV tapes into FCP. Then I synced them up manually and used “Modify->Timecode” to add the correct TC to the HDV media files.

Sean