Timecode may be in for a change
By S Simmons. Filed in Blogs and links, Editing, filmmaking, from the net, Internet resources |
“OK, timecode is a boring topic but it is of vital importance in post production. Timecode allows you to track every frame of video in your post-production project. It’s the kind of thing that you often don’t notice until it’s screwed up. Repeating timecode, broken timecode, dropouts … all the things that when they give you trouble you suddenly realize that timecode is very very important. Studio Daily has posted a very encouraging article about what may be the first changes in timecode in a long time. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers are looking to make the first changes to timecode in some 40 years. If you think about it, today we have many different timecode rates what with all the high definition formats available, many different recording mediums from tape and disk and speeds that are way above and way under the usual 30 frames per second. It’s high time that SMPTE made some changes. The questions now are: how long will it take them to ratify this new timecode standard? and how long will it take hardware and software manufactures to implement these changes and how difficult will it be? There is a mention in the article that “proprietary solutions could work their way in and gum up the works.” For the love of all that is good and holy, let’s hope that SMPTE and the manufactures are able to agree on some kind of standard before every tom, dick and camera manufacturer drops their own version of timecode 2.0. Just look at all the different HD formats and codecs and how they seem to come along every other day. It’s easy for a camera company to introduce a codec but not always easy for non-linear editing software to support it. So let’s all work together and make the future of timecode useful and, more importantly, compatible!
Tuesday, October 7th 2008 at 3:43 am
About time. I’d hope they make it more flexible to handle different frame rates and most of all, be round numbers. Most any digital TV has some pretty smart chips in them, they can handle whatever you throw at them. I hope that creative decisions I make in shooting my project don’t have to be scraped off my project to fit some archaic broadcast standard.