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Timecode trainwreck- a cautionary tale. (or why you should log & capture)
So I get a call on Friday, can I come & look at an edit that may have some sort of odd, vaguely described, poorly understood, & perhaps impossible timecode issue?
It seems that the client sent some effects shots to a post house they use for color correction. The post house loads a tape or 2, and can’t find the proper timecode. It seems that they’re looking for TC in, let’s say, the 22 hour range, & the tape is all in the 16 hour range. Could it be just that this tape is mislabeled? Or that the editor who captured the footage for them gave it the wrong reel name?
No. It was neither of those things.
This entire short is shot on Varicam with time of day TC. It seems that the production crew chose ToD because they thought it would help synching the sections that were shot with 2 cameras. They also continued to use at least 2 or 3 tapes on consecutive days, so that the TC would jump from, say 22 hours to 9 hours when they picked up the next morning.
After getting knee deep in this, seeing that the TC went further off as I got farther into each tape (and was often 12 or 13 hours off if a tape was started one nigh & used again the next morning), I theorized that the editor who captured the footage for my client decided to change the “On Timecode Break” setting to “Warn After Capture”. When I confirmed this on the phone with him, he was, well… surprised, to find out that the after the 1st break, the TC would no longer match the tape. Imagine that. Near as I can tell, he found all the TC breaks to be, well, inconvenient, and logging all those individual scenes, shots & takes clips was so much more bother than capturing whole tape rolls.
I spent 10 hours shuttling through DVCPro HD tapes, matching shots by eye & hand writing an EDL for someone to take into the online session for each scene in question. I told them that none of the TC in their media files can be trusted. At some point in time, someone is going to have to match this all by hand if they want to up-res this from letterboxed DV to HD.
This was my 1st time working for this client. I suspect it won’t be my last. I was also the 1st time this other editor had worked with them. I don’t think his prospects are as good (heh, heh!).
Arnie
Now in preproduction: Peristroika (Cosmological Congress), a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com -
25 Replies
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Funny how many editors I meet that just don’t think TC is all that important. Who’s going to re-capture this stuff anyway? 🙂
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Ooof. Coming from an assistant background I know the importance of Logging and Capturing. Being an editor I know it can be a pain to do that, but timecode is GOLD and many many MANY people who don’t do offline/online workflows don’t get that. Since they capture at full res and work in full res, why would they need TC?
That guy better shape up or he won’t get much work.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
“my client decided to change the “On Timecode Break” setting to “Warn After Capture”. ”
He should’ve had it set to “make new clip” and there’d be no problem (as long as those mixed day tapes are labelled as different reels so the next person knows that the TC will jump from a later time to an earlier time).
It’s sad, but a lot of FCP “pro” editors I’ve met don’t really know the program. Some of them have come from Avid and think they can just figure out as they go and others just started calling themselves editors after playing around with FCP for a couple days.
It’s amazing how much money (and how many hours) could be saved by a day or two of pro training!
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It’s amazing to me that most NLE’s still have no clue on how to handle TC breaks elegantly. If there’s one thing the SONY XPRI really had going for it, it was the way it handled any kind of TC break. Basically, if you captured (for example) a complete reel that was full of broken TC, it would create one master clip complete with TC breaks inside of it. These breaks would appear in the source viewer scrub area with tic marks to indicate where the breaks were, plus you snap to a TC break using the PREV/NEXT edit keys.
You could edit away without ever worrying about the breaks, AND you could recapture from tape accurately, because the internal database kept a record of where the breaks were and in what order – so when shuttling a deck around during a recapture, it knew where the breaks would occur and didn’t get confused if TC repeated, overlapped, etc.
I wish more manufacturers would get this right.
Oh well.
Michael Buday
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FCP handles TC breaks wonderfully. Problem is, hardly anyone knows it does! Give it a try and see for yourself. I think it got a lot better when multiclip support came along, so it could deal with TC breaks.
As for putting it all into a single clip, that would be nice as an option, I guess, but I personally can’t stand scrubbing through mammoth clips.
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[walter biscardi] “Funny how many editors I meet that just don’t think TC is all that important.”
those would be “people who own a NLE system” not “editors” … theres a lot of them about.
and thats exactly why our jobs are safe. owning a NLE system does not an editor make. -
Please advise the client to fire the editor and original production crew members responsible for allowing non ascending timecode on the same tape over multiple days.
The rule or not breaking ascending time is so fundamental it should be a crime for those who f@$k this one up.
Most likely I can’t completely blame the crew as the producer most likely was being cheap and did not hire a qualified DIT on the job who has experience in post production who might have saved this train wreck.
I suspect the producer also wanted to save on tape stock which is the reason why they recorded over multiple days on the same tapes.
I would also suspect they did not use lock it boxes or denecke sbt boxes which maintain an accurate timecode reference when feeding a camcorder.
If the production did not do this and only used the internal timecode generators on the cameras the timecode will drift ever time power is cut off during battery changes etc. In which case all tapes will exhibit major timecode drifts at random spots.
Blame it all on the dark side of digital- hire an inexperienced crew to save money only results in major cost overruns later in post.
Such a shame.
Tony Salgado
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That’s all nice and fine in Sony’s little machine until you export an EDL. Sorry, but Sony’s internal database isn’t going to follow along. Reel names and TC only. Good luck on that one. Sony would just be creating an even bigger headache by ignoring the problem alltogether.
AT LEAST FCP actually acknowledges the problem so that someone that knows what they’re doing can correct it before it reaches the point in this situation we’re discussing. Yoru Sony machine would’ve created nearly the same problem.
True, at least the tc and reels would be accurate from the Sony, but it would’ve been quite the hassle cueing up tapes by hand since they had multiple occasions of the same tc and non-ascending TC.
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Funny — coming from Discreet *edit I always thought, and still think, that FCP’s handling of Time Code breaks is atrocious, the one aspect of FCP that makes me think about changing systems. Enabling “create new clip on break” works sometimes, crashes other times and is totally ignored still other times. It is the worst of all things for an editor — inconsistent. There is no good reason that FCP can’t accomplish something as well as software that has been dead for at least 3 years, yet that is most certainly the case with FCP versus *Edit. Other than the “media mangler” the entire Capture Window is the one area that I wish FCP would totally overhaul.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Herb Sevush] “Funny — coming from Discreet *edit I always thought, and still think, that FCP’s handling of Time Code breaks is atrocious, the one aspect of FCP that makes me think about changing systems. Enabling “create new clip on break” works sometimes, crashes other times and is totally ignored still other times”
If the tapes are logged correctly in the first place, TC breaks don’t matter. I can only think of two times in the past 5 years of using FCP that TC breaks have caused an issue. Both times manually recapturing the clips solved the issue.
If the videographer doesn’t give you enough pre-roll to properly digitize a clip, that’s not FCP’s fault.
It all goes back to proper logging. FCP’s handling or ill-handling of TC breaks doesn’t affect projects which are proper shot and properly logged.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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