Capture Question Please...

Hi there,

I?m logging and capturing for a show that?s got a lot of timecode and signal problems.

I get dropped frame warnings every now and again. Sometimes it will drop frames (or encounter a ?break in time code?) during capture and not warn me. I?ll test it by doing a visual comparison of one point of timecode from the clip vs. that same point of timecode on the tape. When it has, in fact, encountered a problem I?ll see that the shot has lost up to around three seconds over the course of capture!

In anycase, because double checking every clip is taking a ton of time I?m considering not checking them anymore.

***My question is: If a capture session drops frames or has a ?timecode break? but Final Cut doesn?t sense it- what?s the worst that can happen?

My guess is that you?d lose up to a few seconds of footage and get glitchy video. In which case, wouldn?t I be able to spot that during the edit and just re-capture the moment I want?

A little background on the tech specs of the project:
-It began on mini-DV and will end on mini- DV. There?s no offline/online process here..

-No audio from these clips will be used in the final product, so there are no sync issues to worry about.

-The tapes are so screwed up that if all the footage crashed out on the hard drive, going back to the tapes to re-log using batch would be an impossibility. So timecode isn?t helpful in that regard. (I know that the tapes with bad timecode should?ve been transferred to new tapes, recreating the timecode. But due to post weirdness, it just didn?t happen).

Any advice you can share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!


PS. This project is on a G5 with Mac OSX 10.4.8. Using Final Cut Studio 5.1.2. The camera/ DV Device is a Canon XL1.

Are all the tapes Extended Play?

Are you capturing in a way to absolutely eliminate any possibility of capture problems on your system, like no external FireWire drives, nothing else running, etc, etc.

Koz

If FCP is complaining about "dropped frames" on digitize, AND you are not using audio.

Then disable the preference called "abort or warn on dropped frames"

However, never use this on clips that have audio!!!

I had 11 hours of crappy VHS to digitize on FCP with audio and I turned this off and I ended up
with 11 hours of out out of sync audio!

if you have crappy footage, dub it to DVD and then you have clean contigious control track for
the KONA /FCP to sink its teeth into.

Hi Koz,

To answer your question, no, none of the tapes are in extended play. I do have an external 500 GB G-Tech hard drive hooked up via a FireWire 800 cable. Though I'm capturing to the tower, not tothe external.

These just seem to be problematic tapes. They've had problems on several different cameras, decks and computers.

My question is: If I just decide to not worry about any "dropped frames" or "time code breaks" that Final Cut DOESN'T warn me about... what's the worst that could happen? Because at this point, going back to check each and every clip for accurate time code is taking way too long.

And Mark, thank you for the advice. I may try that. But if possible I'd like to still respect instances where FCP actually warns me of problems it's encountered. It's the times that it doesn't warn me that I'm tired of fishing for.

Thanks all...

Have you cleaned the heads on your camera? It could be that the problems are more to do with that than the capture. Could be wrong, but worth a try.

The worst that could happen is that you can't recapture accurately. Since you already said this is not required, or if it was it would already be useless, I would think you could try it.

To minimise the pain - use non-controllable device, turn off 'abort', or 'warn on dropped frames' and use capture now.

But do some tests with known good tapes first if you can, to see if it's your deck/camera.

Why are you not capturing to the GRAID? Capturing to the boot drive can cause problems itself as it is performing all sorts of other tasks.

I second using the non-controllable device set up if you're not going to use the
audio at all from your source tape nor you are batch capturing the footage.
Also, dubbing the source tape by generating another set of timecode onto another
DV tape might just work fine, too.

Nook