loosing sync with capture now

I am trying to capture a tape with bad timecode. To the best of my knowledge, my system should handle a 50 min "capture now" with total ease... but it doesn't

I am loosing audio sync big time and the weirdness continues to QT files. After trimming my 9 GB master file in half (and saving) I am still seeing 9 GB total file size. This even after refreshing folder views and restart.

Have you guys been successful at capturing full DV tapes with one "take"?? Is my system too slow to handle this or what's going on?? No dropped frames were reported during the capture..

Media format: DVCam PAL
FCP 6.0.4
OS X 10.4.11
QT 7.5
Mac 2x2.66 Mhz, 8 GB RAM
Internal Raid: 1 TB/ 600 GB free, 192 MB/s sustained read/write speed (with blackmagic speed test)

If you're trying to get it to ignore the bad timecode, you need to set the capture format to 'Non Controllable Device'. This will build fresh timecode cleanly from 0 when you start the capture to the time you hit stop.

A better idea is to dub the tape to another tape with fresh timecode, then capture the new tape correctly, so it can be recaptured accurately later if need be.

> After trimming my 9 GB master file in half (and saving) I am still seeing 9 GB total file size.

You're probably doing this in QuickTime Player. QuickTime Player's editing functions don't change the raw file unless you do a Save As Self-Contained, into a new file; a simple Save would just add (or subtract) references of the media. That would also do absolutely nothing to fix your sync.

Unless you're using a drive that's not fast enough for DV (and at this point, USB and optical discs are the only formats I can think of that can't handle DV), the size of the file is almost certainly not the cause.

Also, trying to capture a tape with bad timecode and dropouts in one big file is a bad idea. Just log the thing, or redub the tape as Jude suggested. You probably spent more time wrangling the timecode issue than if you had logged properly in the first place.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks Derek. I had no idea I needed to Save As in order to splice things down size-wise in QT. Now I know better

Back to the actual problem...

The sync drift is really odd and probably not caused by broken timecode at all. It seems like something is slowing my system down. Since tape dubbing is not an option (only 1 deck) I try to capture in smaller seqments and see what's going to happen.

> The sync drift is really odd and probably not caused by broken timecode at all. It seems like
> something is slowing my system down.

Actually, broken timecode, dropouts and corrupt data on DV tape can all cause sync drift that looks just like the kind caused by slow drives or system specs. Pretty hard to tell long-distance.

Are you getting timecode-break or "bad data" errors? How are the numbers on the tape -- does the timecode hiccup at all? Also check to see if the tape was shot in LP mode. Is it a sync offset (sound off by x frames starting at point A, remaining constant over time) or a sync drift (increasing distance between picture and sound over time)? Do you have a clip with an In point very close to the very beginning of the tape? That can also cause sync problems.

Try capturing in smaller chunks first. As for redubbing tapes, you don't need two decks -- a DV deck and a DV camera connected with a 4-pin-to-4-pin FireWire cable would suffice.


www.derekmok.com