Off Air recording with TOD timecode

Can anyone think of a way that we can record off air to FCP with time of day timecode?

Jude

this might be worth checking out
[www.adrielec.com]

Cheers
Andy

How good does it need to be?

In a perfect world I'd whip out a box that took the off-air digital bitstream and decoded it just enough to put the numerals in and then put it all back together for you to record or process.

I don't know of any box that will do that, and that's also assuming you're using the digital off-air bitstream like the one I'm watching on the next window over from the one I'm typing on.

In a good deal less perfect world, you can shoot a TV and widen out the camera to include a clock.

We have used Adrienne Electronics for years (decades?) and that's the place to go to look. Depend on not calling them until well after NAB. They will all be recovering in a nice home somewhere.

There is one other thing I'm thinking about. Broadcast television doesn't have to be locked to real time. NBC was, but most of us aren't. That could put your frame counts in jeopardy.

Koz

Jude-

I purchased a device from Telcom Research, the Easy Reader 1.5. This little box will take timecode and insert into a data stream on RS232. It includes a play status in that stream as well. This then passes thorough an included RS232-422 convertor into the 9 pin on my Kona card.

When you do a capture now with a Sony machine control selected you get whatever timecode you send to the Easy Reader along with it.

[www.timecode.com]

<<<timecode and insert into a data stream on RS232.>>>

How did you get the data onto the RS-232 to begin with?

I'm just reading this again. You don't want a timecode burn into the picture, do you? You just want time of day during the capture.

That may run into another problem. Time code only works when the video field boundries line up. That's the picture/real time drift thing again.

Koz

Koz has a good point. The timecode must be in phase with the video. For an off air recording this means a frame sync and a timecode generator that are referenced to the same sync source.

-V

Thanks guys, this is all great information. And yeah - it's not for inserting burnt-in timecode, it's for adding TOD timecode to live recording, so people logging incoming footage can make time-of-day notes that will be reflected in the recorded timecode and therefore be retrievable under high pressure later.