HDV dubs - any tips?

Hi, all.

i've been capturing from HDV tapes,
and there are some that seem to have MANY TC breaks in them.

i've experimented with dubbing these across,
going from one camera (Sony-Z1) to another (Sony V1).
but i'm still getting TC errors.
i've tried twice,
one i set the camera to run rec, and changed another TC setting (dont have camera right now).
this gave me identical TC until the first break, then it slipped, naturally, with each break.

next i tried to establish a brand new TC on the tape.

both of these dubs had TC problems and wouldn't capture.

so does anyone have any tips.
if pressed, i can borrow a small HDV deck,
which would presumably have better TC functions.
but the 2 cameras belong to the production, and it would be good to use them.


thanks,
nick

Cloning the tape - is what you are talking about. Yes, using an HDV tape deck and another camera would be the best way. You just play one of the tapes and record the other. That should get rid of timecode breaks

Nick

I think if you record from 1 cam to the other it's just a data clone and so the TC breaks will stay.

Why don't you capture the complete tape with the "make new clip at tc break". This may take a while with some cameras I heard, but it would be the easiest way.

From there you could create a new copy of the tape with continues TC.

Andreas

I had to capture 5 HDV tapes' worth of material and all of it had TC breaks in it as well. When I looked closer I found the breaks were occuring at the start/stop of each take or section on the tape. Never got a decent answer as to whether it was a problem with the camera, deck, operator error, or some annoying HDV glitch. Anyway, "make new clip at break" never worked for me, as FCP would just sit there hunting back and forth and producing 1-frame clips; I finally just knuckled down and logged and captured each take...

HTH,
JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

my story is that we've got 124 tapes that came in recently.

most tapes captured just fine,
but there were some that had more TC breaks than we were willing to deal with at the time,
so we put them aside, and grabbed the easy ones.
now there's nothing but 10 "hard" ones left.

of those, there's a couple that i feel like i need sooner rather than later,
so i've been nursiing them through.

the "New Clip on TC Break" rarely works with these tapes, and i'm getting exactly the same result as John describes.

what i do, however is log the whole tape, or the obvious breaks where TC re-sets.
then FCP will find another break, hunt around for a couple of minutes,
and give up.

it saves what it's captured, so that's cool,
and it ALSO creates a new offline clip which has a new in point.
here's where FCP gets a little bit stupid,
as the new clip has a TC that FCP knows it cant use.

so i go in and add a second to that number (or often just round it up to the next second)

i also have to change to out-point back to the original logged one,
as FCP hangs onto a DURATION rather than the OUT POINT,
and changes the out point to another impossible number.

i've been having this go in the background, so it takes AGES to capture (which is alright for now)
if i have someone come in and sit and watch the capture,
i reckon it'll take about 2Hrs for each 1Hr tape

if i get an HDV deck in,
we can have one Camera and the deck making dubs,
and the other camera capturing.

dubs *might* give me clean TC around the breaks,
which gives us more usable material.
somewhere in there there's going to be a few shots with good stuff right at the head of a new shot!



thanks,
nick

I can possibly see the keyframing of HDV impacting this, why FCP takes longer to pick up image and timecode. When playing back HDV, I've noticed it takes longer, as it has to play through more frames to pick up the key frame. That's how HDV packs more onto a tape. Mpeg compression, if I remember right.

Also, TC breaks are generally from sloppy camera work (I won't say that it doesn't happen to me anymore, but it does happen less with practice and knowledge of the camera).

Nick - do you need to stay HDV native? Can you capture as 'non controllable device', which will create fresh TC? If you do this as a whole tape from the head, you might be able to get a single clean run, which you can backup to tape from FCP.

I have no idea if this will actually work with HDV, but I'd be interested to hear if it does. Or if an E to E step would help. Obviously TC accuracy will be off by a few frames, but probably better than the crunched up mess it sounds like now.

In general, how is the HDV thing working out for you guys?

Nick have you tried to use WackedTV to capture the whole tape?

Andreas

Quote
Jude
In general, how is the HDV thing working out for you guys?

i haven't use it to much, i have to admit.
i captured a few early tapes as HDV while we were putting a promo together.
the long render times i'd heard about weren't an issue for me at all.
and it looked great in FCP.
so much better than DV, which FCP plays at a reduced quality, i think.
some of our shots looked simply spectacular,and text was super crisp compared to DV.

as i said most renders were not a problem at all,
and we had some green screen material in there, too.
there was a lot of "Full" quality renders though, and when i set FCP to render those,
that;s when i got the dreaded "Confoming HDV" warning which looked like it was giung to take a really long time.


the other thing that disturbed me was the lack of DV Start/Stop detect.
i like capturing in "Scene" chunks, and using the DV Start/Stop markers to zip through the clips
some of our footage was taken at bombing sites, or other sites of unrest.
on those rolls we have lots of material for the one scene, (Whole tapes) and lots of short shots.
so having the markers is useful.

but FCP cant see the Time of Day code breaks on HDV the way it can on DV,
so i couldn't get my markers.
i tried capturing some HDV tapes using the "Make new clip for each shot" method.
that had drawbacks:
TOO MANY CLIPS!
so i put whole tape's worth of clips into sequences and edited from those.
that has a major drawback or me:
markers added to a sequence arent accessible in the browser the way clip markers are.

this was a slight problem for me as i had added a fair few of markers,
and the only way to find my shots again was to load each sequence into the viewer one by one,
or have them open as sequences, and then edit by copy / pasting shots (boring!)


so for 2 reasons: Long Exports and no Start/Stop detect, i made a decision that we would capture and edit as DV.

now i'm not so sure i was right.
i think it wouldn't have been too hard to go thru my clips and find and mark good shots myself,

and as for the export issue, i think i would have worked around that by simply NOT exporting:
play out to DV tape, or direct to DVD recorder.
i think FCP6 lets you play non-DV formats out FW to DV?? (been too busy to check that)
but our favourite method is to use a DVI to video conversion.
in the past we did that from a QT export,
but i could have done it direct from FCP.

why is this our favourite method?
because it gives us "instant de-interlace"


anyway the upshot is that we've got over a hundred tapes now captured as DV,
so i'll be missing out on the HDV editing experience again, and it also means some re-captuing at the end.

Quote
Andreas

Nick have you tried to use WackedTV to capture the whole tape?


i didn't think of that, Andreas.
that would give me an MPEG Stream that i than convert to whatever format i need, right?

can that work in an off-ine / on-line work-flow?

convert to DV, say
keep the MPeg Stream somewhere safe,
then when i need to, convert sections to PRoRes, say

but i think i remember that any conversions of the MPeg Stream have a zero start TC?



nick

I'm kind of dreading the whole experience, personally. I did some work recently with a bunch of uni kids on iMacs and HDV, but they downconverted to Apple intermediate, and that was enough of a struggle for some. What worries me us that all the prosumer cameras we've seen recently are HDV, so it seems like a nasty little inevitablilty.

Quote
Nick
i tried capturing some HDV tapes using the "Make new clip for each shot" method.
that had drawbacks: TOO MANY CLIPS!

So i put whole tape's worth of clips into sequences and edited from those.
that has a major drawback or me: markers added to a sequence arent accessible in the browser the way clip markers are.

I'm probably missing something here, after I capture an entire clip I load the clip into the viewer and quickly drop markers at the appropriate points, in the browser name the markers and then drag them into a new folder which converts them all to subclips and then edit as usual.

sure that's a way to go, too.

i was just saying that with HDV you have the option to break your capture into individual shots.
i tried that , but didn't like it.
(another downside was the project sizes were a lot larger than if there was less files)

other rolls i captured in their entirety,
and i did zip though them and ad markers,
but i didn't make them into subclips. that wouldn't have worked for me with the material

i missed my beloved DV Start/Sop Detect, and opted to have an easier editing process,
followed by a re-capture, either as HDV or ProRes.


nick