TC breaks when capturing ProRes HQ 1080i 29.97

[David Roth weiss]

I had similar problems capturing HDCAM at 23.98 with a Sony J3 player capturing via SDI. FCP was creating timecode breaks where there were none and an then of course it doesn’t have the ability to start capturing again after the timecode break because there weren’t any there in the first place. It turned a four hour session into a six hour session.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Sean Oneil]

I’ve seen this a lot when the system can’t keep up. It seems to happen in lieu of getting a dropped frames warning.

[David Roth weiss]

I’m capturing 23.98 HDCAM via a SDI through a Kona card as DVCProHD to four striped SATA drives with 200mbps write speed. I gon’t see how that is not able to keep up, and if it is having that problem why would it simply indicate dropped frames?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Gary Adcock]

[David Roth Weiss] “I’m capturing 23.98 HDCAM via a SDI through a Kona card as DVCProHD to four striped SATA drives with 200mbps write speed. I gon’t see how that is not able to keep up, and if it is having that problem why would it simply indicate dropped frames? “

Check one of the files with the” show long frames” under the Tools Menu.
FCP ( and AVID also) tend to drop a frame in the first 3-5 frames of a capture, Avids ignore this but FCP still warns people.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Sara Shier]

Hi…
I’m not sure if this could be your problem, but it was mine.

I have a MacPro Dual Quad Core with 5 GB of RAM, FCP 6 and an AJA Kona 3 card (software v 4.0) capturing to internal SATA 7200 drives. I was trying to capture Apple Prores 422 HQ (1080i 29.97) from an HDW-D1800 HDCAM deck. I couldn’t capture that format or reqular quality Apple Prores because of dropped frames. If I told FCP to ignore dropped frames, I could capture but not playback. DVCProHD worked fine. My system’s definitely beefy enough to handle ProRes. I tried everything I could think of and the following morning I called AJA for ideas. They told me that there’s a software bug with the Kona 3/driver v 4.0 – supposedly systems with over 2GB of RAM have problems working with Prores because of this dropped-frame issue. So I removed 3GBs of RAM and bingo! They’re apparently working on a fix.
So I’m not sure if this might be related to your problem but you might look into it. I posted this awhile back in the Kona forum and a couple of people said that their systems were over 2GB and they weren’t having problems. This is what AJA told me and it fixed my problem (although 2GB wasn’t enough for the work I was doing with prores HQ in FCP so I had to go back up to 5GB after capture for editing)
Good luck!

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Gary,

Well, the good news is that the only long frames were at the very start (first frame) of each clip captured. So, if I’m understanding things correctly that doesn’t seem to indicate a problem.

The bad news is that all files were captured manually and that FCP was indeed stopping capture where no timecode breaks existed (in the middle of interviews) but without stopping the deck. This forced me to manually find and set an overlapping in point in the middle of an interview at which to begin a new capture–a highly undesireable way to work. BTW, the places at which capture stopped were not repeatable.

Any other ideas what could be causing this???

Thanks for your help,
David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[David Roth weiss]

[SaraAnn] “I called AJA for ideas. They told me that there’s a software bug with the Kona 3/driver v 4.0 – supposedly systems with over 2GB of RAM have problems working with Prores because of this dropped-frame issue. So I removed 3GBs of RAM and bingo! They’re apparently working on a fix.”

I read that SaraAnn and I certainly hope that’s not a problem with capturing DVCProHD now. I’ll check with Kona Monday to see what they say. And, I’m using a G5 not a MacPro, which I’ve not heard anything about in this regard.

Thanks,
David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Zepolveda]

After a lot of hand-wringing, I think the TC break thing (in ProRes, anyway) is due to a 10-bit digitizer conflict with the Kona card. Thanks for all your responses, by the way.

I messed around with the capture preset and changed the Digitizer field in ProResHQ to Kona 8-bit, and that seemed to work at 1080i 29.97 (the Digitizer field was defaulted to 10bit at both ProRes and ProResHQ.)

and for David, I would check on your J-H3 to see if it is mistakenly on the pull-down setting? It will read 23.98PD if it is, but for DVCProHD it should be 23.98psf.

[David Roth weiss]

[zepolveda] “and for David, I would check on your J-H3 to see if it is mistakenly on the pull-down setting? It will read 23.98PD if it is, but for DVCProHD it should be 23.98psf.”

Nope, it was definitely set on 23.98psf. The files are all perfect at 23.98p.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Patrick Troy]

I had the same issue caturing ProRes throught the Kona 3

Hanging up intermittently through capture, no amount of tweaking would solve it.
After about 50 hrs of capture headache I finally found a sniff of a solution

I emailed AJA and they sent me a little script to go into FCP plugin folder called “DisableAltETTPolling.txt” tht solved it for me.

regards

Patrick