Z1 and timecode based capture
 

Hi,

I know I've read it on some forum (Probably here) before, so I'm sorry if I'm repeating it, but I cannot find those posts again: When capturing from Sony Z1 camcorder, from tape where timecode is set to an hour or more (to distinguish tapes as usual), with in and out points specified, the camcorder starts to fast forward away from in point to the end of tape.
I thought it's an issue of older versions of Aspect HD, I remember that when I've read it the Z1 camcorder was not officialy supported yet by Cineform.
I recorded tapes from zero timecode during my last project for sure and it's working fine. But now I've inserted one older tape (with 1h+ timecode) and unfortunately found out that this behavior still persist even in Aspect HD 3.1 release version. So there is no way (even approximately) to reconstruct a project using batch capture.
It is the same in either PPro and HDlink. It's enough to let camera go to specific timecode. Or did I miss something?

Thanks for advice

For annoying technical reasons the camera does not support direct timecode seeks, instead it supports seek to an ATN (Absolute Track Number.) This results in the issue you see, Aspect HD only support timecodes that starts with zero (this way ATN and timecode are in sync.) We capture based on timecode (for frame accuracy) but we can only seek based on ATNs. As more HDV cameras support non-zero start timecode (today only Z1 does) the priority will increase to support those tapes striped that way. It is solvable. Sorry we weren't able to add that feature to Aspect HD 3.1.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm