The Editblog

Hot on the heels of LlamaSlate comes another film slate-style application for the iPhone called … Slate! Where LlameSlate was more of a rethinking of the traditional camera slate Slate actually tries to look and feel like a real timecode slate. They’ve done well in that you can just tap the Scene and Take numbers to increment and you can also type in custom production and director names. Tape the clapper bar and it will beep or clap. It could be used to actually sync audio and video. What seems to be the best feature are the actual running timecode numbers though they only seem to run on time. It’s too bad there isn’t a way to actually set a custom timecode or take an external timecode in feed via wifi or a hardware adapter. That’s when things like this move from novelty to an actual useful product for production and post. Plus it would be great if the slate would switch to a landscape view with bigger timecode numbers when you tilt the phone on its side. Hopefully it will get better with updates in the future. Here’s the iTunes link to Slate. It’s $1.99.

Now I ask again, where’s that timecode calculator for the iPhone!?!? That would be useful.

“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!