Multiple timecodes in a single clip
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing |
I noticed something the other day. While doing some testing with RED footage I rendered a Quicktime of 3 shots out of RedCine. The usual way that I render out of RedCine is to have the app place all of the individual files into their own individual event folder. This keeps things nice and tidy. But this time I forgot to check the setting…
When the render was complete I had a single Quicktime file that included all three shots. What I found interesting was that each shot in the Quicktime retained its own individual timecode. Here’s the first shot:
As expected the timecode in the file matches the burn-in. Here’s the third shot:
The timecode of the Quicktime file changes to match the burn-in as that was the original timecode of the file as exported from RedCine. I guess I’ve never thought about multiple shots in one Quicktime file retaining its own individual timecode but there it is. Usually when I see a QT with multiple shots it is from an edit and that retains the timecode of the edit sequence or default to a 00.00.00 number depending on the codec used to make the file. So this kind of surprised me. Then I dropped the QT into Final Cut Pro.
The first shot retained the correct code as expected:
But then the other shots didn’t:
Final Cut Pro kept counting up from the first frame until the end of the clip. What does this mean? Well I’m not sure other than it’s not really reading the timecode of the original file, more the first frame. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not really sure about that either! If you are capturing from a piece of tape and you have a timecode break you normally want FCP (or any other NLE application) to abort the capture and give you a separate master clip for each unbroken piece of timecode. If you have FCP ignore timecode breaks on tape then it keeps counting upward until the end of capture and then it warns you of the breaks and that you need to recapture the media. But in a tapeless world this isn’t usually an issue as each piece of media has its own unique timecode.
Why would you ever have a clip that had multiple shots with multiple timecodes as I created above? I can’t think of a reason when you would have one or why you would create one … other than it being a mistake like the one I created. But it’s at least good to know the behavior. I then brought the same clip into Adobe Premiere Pro and it didn’t match from the first frame but that’s a question for another day.
What say you other editors and timecode gurus?
Friday, May 2nd 2008 at 3:09 pm
If you wanted to, you could make the same ‘frankenstein’ movie by copying and pasting different movies together in QuickTime Player. The timecode tracks get pasted together in the same way that the audio and video tracks do. QuickTime Player reads the actual timecode track for each frame but as you say FCP looks at the timecode of the first frame and calculates an offset for the rest of the clip.