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Timecode trainwreck- a cautionary tale. (or why you should log & capture)
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[Kevin Monahan] “I don’t agree. A good editor must be both an artist and a technician. It’s OK to be better in one department of the other, but you really have to wear more hats.”
Absolutely, especially when you run your own company or freelance. Especially freelancing when you’re walking into multiple edit suites that may or may not be set up correctly. It always amazes me how many systems I’ll build that are working perfectly when delivered absolutely fall apart within months.
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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>>That’s all nice and fine in Sony’s little machine until you export an EDL<< Exporting an EDL is a problem for any system that encounters overlapping or non-ascending TC breaks during capture. Even if each break is captured as a separate clip, it's going to present the same problem. If you're exporting an EDL to a linear system (or an NLE), cueing tapes with TC breaks as I outlined is going to be a problem for any RS-422 controlled deck. >>Sony would just be creating an even bigger headache by ignoring the problem alltogether.<< You're making assumptions. I never said the problem was ignored. The system logged the breaks as they existed on the tape, with visual cues so the operator/editor could plainly see that there were TC breaks in the first place. If you wanted the system to stop capture at each TC break, you could set it up it do that. If I'm editing/finishing on the same system, and there's a transmission deadline approaching, all I care about is that the tape is captured quickly and accurately with a minimum of user intervention. >>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<< I'm not sure what your point is. This scenario would be a problem (as mentioned above) for almost ALL systems that need to cue a deck with the assumption that the TC is always going to ascend - FCP included. Unless you want to take the time to dub the offending tapes to another tape with continuous TC, this is what we have to live with. My point was that IF you needed to recapture footage with the SONY (to up-rez for example), the system would handle it without ANY user intervention. The fact is it would be a huge bonus for FCP to have a similar scheme in place for those editing scenarios where footage HAS to be captured quickly without logging, without the VTR stopping, and the TC trace back to the original tapes must be spot-on frame accurate. Michael Buday
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I wouldn’t blame the editors as much as the producers. There are inexperienced or BS people in every field of work. It’s the people who hire them that should be blamed. After all, it’s the producers who meet/interview/hire these editors. If they can’t sort out the experienced from the beginners or simply don’t want to pay the experienced editors – then they get what they pay for. From my experiences, indies as well as production companies will often skimp on paying the experienced editors and go with someone cheaper. Not all but enough. I’m also surprised by how many experienced directors and shooters who don’t shoot “properly” in terms of timecode and pre/post roll.
As for Kevin’s comments about a good editor must be technically adept. I usually agree but I don’t think you MUST be technically adept in every case. A good friend of mine is an feature film editor in Europe with her films nominated for Golden Globes, awards from Cannes and many other international film fest. She edits in Avid, Lightworks, and FCP. She’d be the first to tell you she’s not technical at all. She has assistants who do all the capturing and tech issues. She knows how to tell a great story. Nonetheless, i would say she’s a great editor : )
CHL
Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Video Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Trainer
http://www.chiholee.com -
Totally Chi-Ho. I mean, I’m sure that the heavy hitters rely on assistants to worry about tech issues. I hope that happens to me some day. 🙂
Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com
Pres. SF Cutters -
Totally agree Tony.
FWIW a corporate video production company I was assistant editor for always always shot TOD. We cut on Lightworks; capturing was a breeze – load the tape, hit digitise, LW created a new clip every time there was a TC break. Multiple camera shoots were a breeze as all the cameras were set to same TC at start of each shoot day. (TC may have drifted slightly but syncing was easily fixed). Never never was there non-ascending code.
TOD was a great way to go. You had a feel for the shoot by knowing what time it was, you could create kemrolls for the different cameras to figure out who was where when, and stuff just worked. Onlining was simple too.
Logging and capturing in FCP is a bit of a dawg by comparison, but my workflows are now totally different and TC is continuous …
my2
tom ackroyd
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