Cameron Bill
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Great info everyone. Thanks for all’s advice as I am battling the exact same issues and am frustrated that my TC burns for the past year appear to be off by a few minutes.
I have some more info that might help.
- In short, yes there is a major bug it seems with the Adobe family reading AVCHD 23.976 footage timecode.
- To get the correct TC, you’ll need to use Prelude or the Media Browser to access the original footage from the SD card (or from within the PRIVATE file structure. – It seems Adobe correctly sees the TC if the footage is within the metadata file structure mess of the AVCHD media.
- Alternatively, you can open the AVCHD footage in any other Quicktime based application (FCPX, compressor, Resolve, etc that is NOT Adobe) and export as a ProRes or equivalent master file that can support timecode. You can now import this ProRes file into Premiere and it will have correct timecode.
Again – Adobe does not read native AVCHD timecode correctly if the clips are re-wrapped and outside their PRIVATE file structure.
Here’s my data:
Source footage is AVCHD 1080p 23.976 from Canon C100. Notice the incorrect TC of 14:55:39:11 in methods 1 and 2. Notice the correct TC of 14:56:33:05 in trials 3-6.
01 – I ingested/copied into FCPX (from SD card to our SAN). FCPX said TC was 14:56:xx:xx. Imported that exact same AVCHD clip (from inside the FCPX original footage folder) into Premiere. Premiere said it was 14:55:xx:xx. Wrong.
02 – Tried using Media Browser in Premiere to import the AVCHD footage from the FCPX library. 14:55:xx Wrong.
03 – Used Media Browser to import the footage FROM the source SD Card. Read as 14:46:xx. Correct! It likes having that metadata to help it from the PRIVATE folder. Always keep this PRIVATE folder structure intact!
04 – Prelude transfer from source SD Card –
- Correct.
This just copies over the clips WITH their folder structure and PRIVATE folder to your destination.
04a – Prelude rewrap with Quicktime FAILED. Again, I could not get Prelude to just rewrap the AVCHD footage as a .mov and ingest it. I’m guessing this has roots in our TC problem as well.
05 – Prelude transcode from source SD card to ProRes worked with 14:56 TC. Correct!
06 – FCPX – ingested clip into FCPX. Then exported — cough — sorry, shared the original file as its source format, which was AVCHD, not ProRes, but whatever, FCPX only does ProRes exporting natively, so that works.
Brought that ProRes clip (same 1080p 23.976 settings as AVCHD source) into Premiere, and it was happy. Correct.
Update: Testing 1 hr AVCHD df and ndf footage:
07 – Let’s see what 1 hr time coded AVCHD footage reads like, both NDF and DF in Premiere!
I copied my AVCHD clip that had been wrapped as a .mov and changed it’s starting timecode to 1:00:00:00 (1 hr) with an awesome program called QT Edit. I made two clips, a 1hr NDF and 1hr DropFrame file. Opened them both in Quicktime 7 and confirmed their starting TC.
This is where my brain started melting.
NDF 1hr was fine in QT7.
QT7 saw the DF footage as 1:00:04;12.
Hmm…. okay. NDF > DF wonkiness conversion probably happening here.
Then brought those two clips into Premiere:
As I expected, the NDF 1hr AVCHD clip was NOT ready properly and had a starting TC of 00-:59:56:09. Is four seconds of sync drift per hour is about right for NDF/DF offset? Methinks so but speculating.
The AVCHD DF file, however, had the original (wrong) TC as the beginning TC. (14:55:xx). Hmph. I’m stumped and not smart enough at this hour to tackle this issue. But whatever, I now have some good options and I know what NOT to do — Adobe + Rewrapped AVCHD = NG!
I look forward to hearing any thoughts or questions, wisdom, etc!
cb
