Time code problem

A colleague provided me with a miniDV tape he shot that has video artifacts from what appears to be a degraded video head in the camcorder. When I tried to digitize from the tape, I received continual stop in the process with a "timecode error" message, which I expected. So, I ran the tape from the camcorder to a new tape in my Sony DSR-20, thinking the DSR-20 would create a new usable timecode. However, when I try to digitize from the copied tape, I get the same error messages (bad timecode). Doesn't a unit like a Sony DSR-20 create new timecode, ir does it just copy the timecode from the original tape?

That timecode message doesn't just appear when it's a timecode break. It can also happen when you have a bad sector of video information. That can get copied from DV tape to DV tape and new continuous timecode won't help.

This may not be fixable. You can try capturing as non-controllable device, or run the DV deck through an analog video-signal path to bypass the bad section of data.


www.derekmok.com

It could also be a bad drive causing dropped frames.



www.strypesinpost.com

DV and HDV are notorious for creating what I call "phantom" timecode breaks. For a situation like yours, I would simply go to your User Preferences and change "On Timecode Break" to "Warn After Capture." This way FCP will ignore what it thinks it a timecode break and simply give you a warning after the capture. But at least you get your footage captured in one shot.

HDV especially is terrible with bogus TC breaks so as a rule, we leave On Timecode Break set to Warn After Capture as default.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Hmm... I had an issue recently on an underperforming SAN, which was dropping frames on capturing ProRes SD and the AEs doing the capturing had set FCP up to ignore timecode breaks on capture. What happened was that when we finally had the show assembled, and ready to dump, there were certain clips that simply will not render or export without slipping to another portion of the clip. The render/batch export/export>quicktime movie will always slip to the exact same wrong portions of the clip. We couldn't even media manage and do a batch recapture.

My pet theory is that the timecode breaks on the TC track caused FCP to slip sync after rendering/exporting.



www.strypesinpost.com