Timecode through Addenda Lanc Convertor

[Ken Botelho]

Hi Tim,
Not to discourage you from resolving your TC issue… but what’s keeping you from capturing direct via FireWire? Your ingest quality will be 100% lossless from the original source. Unfortunately, I have no experience with the “Addenda Lanc Convertor” but it seems like the issue may be something with settings in the software. Have you tried hot plugging the lanc cable in while its capturing to see if it ever locks in to TC?

-Kenny

[Tim Kirby]

Hi Ken,

Thanks for the input – just tried hot plugging to no avail. I’m working to a Directors brief – 5 cameras shot an event HDV, he wants footage captured in SD Prores 422…might be being a bit dim here but I didn’t think I could capture to SD Prores 422 HQ from HDV source over firewire, HD maybe, but SD? Hence the Addenda..

—————————–
Man cannot discover new oceans until he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

[Ken Botelho]

[Tim Kirby] “Hi Ken,

Thanks for the input – just tried hot plugging to no avail. I’m working to a Directors brief – 5 cameras shot an event HDV, he wants footage captured in SD Prores 422…might be being a bit dim here but I didn’t think I could capture to SD Prores 422 HQ from HDV source over firewire, HD maybe, but SD? Hence the Addenda..”

Tim, sorry to hear your still troubleshooting this. So, you cannot down-convert in realtime using FW (I believe) but you can however utilize what you have. You can get some real great results (IMHO better then AJA) with capturing your footage via Final Cut or VTR Xchange in its native HDV format, and then using Apple Compressor to down-convert your clips with embedded time-code from HDV to Apple ProRes 422 as SD material (Pillarbox cropping or widescreen), and since it uses the “Optical Flow” backbone, the results are quite amazing, you also have control of the bounding box of where to crop and some other neat filters. I recommend you use this as your “workaround” until the real mystery is uncovered. Sure its an extra step but I think you will be pleased with the results.

[Bob Zelin]

If you want to work with ProRes422HQ, and not be in render hell with this HDV footage, there is unfortunately only one real answer – the Sony HVR-1500. This will give you an HD-SDI output with RS422 VTR control, and you can do whatever you want. I know that this costs a lot of money.

Bob Zelin

[Tim Kirby]

Not so much to hire for a day Bob, thanks very much for the tip.

—————————–
Man cannot discover new oceans until he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

[Tim Kirby]

Thanks for this work around Ken, appreciated. The volume of material that needs capturing and would need encoding makes the additional step quite daunting in this case – I think a different deck with SDI as Bob suggests would be quicker. Still, you can bet I’ll be doing it your way sometime soon as well!

—————————–
Man cannot discover new oceans until he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

[Ken Botelho]

No Problem Tim,
Ok…. One last solution I have that will save you from rendering and get you the time code you need, believe me I never give up. Output from your deck and use capture now to get your footage without time code, but for the fist few seconds… toggle the time code display window on the deck to capture this for a few seconds and then back off. This will be your master time code reference.

Now with the clips imported in the Final Cut Bin select, open in Viewer and highlight a clip and set the play head to the part of the clip where you can see the the time code window at the beginning, go to the MenuBar and select [ Modify > Timecode… ]. Now set your frame-rate, and enter in the exact time code you have displayed on the current frame , and save. THATS IT! This is frame accurate, scan through parts of the tape to confirm it worked. I have used this a few times for multi-cam projects and works wonders.

[Tim Kirby]

Hi Ken,

Another great suggestion for my list, and one I actually should have been looking for a couple of months back! I should have said that this job was shot with freerun time of day TC, with cameras stopping and starting in various locations filming a run around london – so I’m still stuck with this one.

Really appreciate you taking the time to share your knowledge – always learning!!

—————————–
Man cannot discover new oceans until he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

[Ken Botelho]

No problem Tim,
The well of ideas is offically dry…

[Jeremy Garchow]

Do you have timecode source set to ‘deck’ in the preferences?

Jeremy