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Timecode breaks where there are none? Problems with FCP or Cameras or Decks?
Hi. This is related to another post I made a few days ago but I think I need to be more specific.
We have 5 FCP 5.1.1 edit suits, four newly installed on a Xsan media network, a fifth standalone as a back-up digitising station. In the past the company has only done online DV edits. Now it’s moving into offline SD and HD projects.
What we’ve noticed in the last few weeks are a lot of timecode issues in captured, downconverted media. Both from HDV decks, Digi decks and HDCAM decks – all being sucked in via DV with only DV deck control.
While capturing, FCP stops capturing, apparently having found a timecode break, then spends a few mintutes cueing up again after the time code break, makes a new clip and starts to capture again.
Except there is no timecode break.
It’s been tough to check this on the HDV and J-30 decks but on a J-H3 deck its easy to jog through and jump between the HD frames and see that there’s no issues with TC – right in the middle of a sequence, NOT when the camera has been stopped/started/battery switched. Meanwhile there’s 5 seconds of footage missing between teh two clips…
So where is the issue? Is it that donconverting from HD, SD or HDV has inherent issues over firewire in terms of dependable TC info? Could there be a break in some other part of the control track? Is it a bug in the incredibly bad FCP Log and Capture tool? I can’t say wheher this was an issue in 5.0.2 which was being used before but then again it’s happening on one workstation using 4.5…
I’ve come from an Avid background and it’s driving me and our team to serious distraction.
Any pointers, idea’s hugely appreciated.
Ben Wharton
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26 Replies
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Go into your User Preferences and change “on timecode break:” to warn after capture.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Hi Wayne
Unfortunately the “warn after capture” isn’t an option because when there ARE timecode breaks, FCP will keep on generating new TC and everything after the break(s) will be out of sync with the real TC on the tape. Way too dangerous for online.
Does anyone else have this issue? We really need to discover where the probelm lies and if it can be rectified.
Thanks.
Ben
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We had a similar issue recently. I needed to capture a 90 min beta and a 60 min beta of a lecture to put on dvd. Logged a long clip of the whole tape hit batch capture and took a long lunch break. when I got back I found that there were about 3 areas where FCP decided there were TC Breaks where there in fact were not. I tried capturing it again and got about just as many timecode breaks but in different places. I was downconverting to DV through our AJA Io. I’m guessing that when you had this problem you were capturing rather large clips, or perhaps even whole tapes.
-mattyc -
I haven’t ever been able to figure out the logic behind this, but when we’ve had that problem in the past, it’s been because of a read/write issue to the capture disk… when there’s a lot of traffic on our SAN and I’m capturing, I’ll occasionally get the phantom timecode breaks, but when the traffic slows down, I can re capture no problem.
So maybe something’s going on with your Xsan?Andrew
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Mattyc –
Thanks for the reply. A relief of sorts to know that someone else is having the same issues. And yes, capturing whole tapes in general. I know that you’re supposed to chop up tapes into two or three sections but still, this shouldn’t be happening.
Did you have the same breaks when NOT downconverting?
And anyone else out there able to confirm this problem? And if it’s on a specific version of FCP or even happening on Avid too?
Any official Apple FCP reported bug?
Ben
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Well, sorry I couldn’t help. BUT if it means anything to you.
I saw this same problem recently with a large project on 90 min BetaSP using the AJA IO. I ended up with several cuts beacuse of the phantom timecode breaks when capture the entire tape. I trudged through it and made my DVDs like usual. But thankfully that was all I needed to do.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Again similar problem here, capturing via Blackmagic Extreme card from a DSR 85 Deck with 422 control I had a number of timecode breaks in different places. I had to use “on timecode break” in the end. I suspect FCP loses contact with the deck for for a split second and senses that as a timecode break.
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Typically, I don’t capture whole tapes and was only doing these for a dvd, so the work around was just finding where the faux breaks were and capture a short segment and TC matching it to the original on the timeline. I’m not sure if it’s just when downconverting, but I would seriously doubt it. I think it’s just a slight bug for long captures. I do recall another instance which i did capture a full tape and it was successful. In this instance I was running on FCP 4.5. I think there are just some problems in 5 captureing large blocks of video. I posted yesterday about a problem we are having on another DV only system where we drop frames around 15 min or so capturing to a drive that when running FCP 4.5 was able to caputer clips of an hour plus.
-mattyc -
Ben –
I get this problem when capturing thru a Blackmagic HD Pro card over SDI — no down converting, no firewire, rs-422 control.
I find the FCP capture tool to be quite buggy and a major pain the the butt. Batch re-capturing can turn into a crap shoot becuase of these phantom breaks. Along with the “media-mangler” this is the worst part of FCP and I wish to heaven that instead on ever newer features they would just fix the problems they have had for so long.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
One of my clients (a television station with FCP stations on Xsan) has exactly this kind of problem. They capture my digibeta footage (whole tapes) to a shared Xsan storage and sometimes FCP has lots of ‘timecode breaks’ where in reality there aren’t any. I don’t know if and how they fix it, but more than once they have to recapture the whole bunch because they end up with LOTS of clips and lose several seconds of footage in between.
Hans Vernhout
Director / lighting cameraman
The Netherlands
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