Is this normal for Final Cut?
 

I've been trying to find out if my HD100UA is broken. I think there may be some time code issues. So, tell me if this is normal. When I hook it up to the latest Final Cut (5.1.4), I have no deck control - or at least it doesn't let me make in and out points. It lets me control the camera with the fast forward, and rewind and such, but only lets me "Capture Now." When I look at the timecode of recorded clips, they are 30NonDrop instead of 24PNon-Drop.

The camera was shooting 24P. The timecode in the viewfinder doesn't appear to ever skip. The Timecode is 24 non-drop.

Final cut was set to record 720P/24 HDV. Controls were set to control an HDV deck.

The computer is a superfast brand new with dual 2.8 xeon processors.

The video looks fine.

The timecode counting of the seconds appears fine, (though I haven't captured any super long cllips) but the frame count is off in a way that would reflect a relationship with 24. Example - when the tape says frame 1, FCP says 1, when the tape says 12, FCP says 15 (both are half a second), when the tape says 20, FCP says 25)

Is this normal? If so, will I be able to rebatch my clips if I have a hard drive crash?

-Thanks

It sounds like your first problem is that the camera is not in VTR mode. Flip open the LCD display and press the little button.
You should now have full control and batch capture options.

As for the TC issues, this has been something I have been working on since v5.1.2 was released. The deck does the same thing.

FCP seems to read the TC properly at every flip over of one second, but it assumes 30fps TC for all values in between.

I got myself into a predicament because of this.
Last summer I captured about 20 tapes for a feature film using a decklink card and downconverted NTSC with burn-in TC from the deck. I made a special control preset for RS-422 that uses 24fps TC. The Decklink card captured properly in 23.98, throwing away the pulldown frames and I spent months offlining this way with the confidence of perfectly calibrated source TC and Burn-in TC.
I was waiting until v5.1.2 was released in order to re-conform the clips in HDV, but then this problem reared its ugly head and my EDL doesn't really mean much anymore.

My solution was to modify the source clips' TC to 30fps (1 step batch process) and FCP automatically figured out the frame relationship. I was then able to reconform my trimmed sequence clips (after some batch list exporting to and importing from Excel.)
The other thing I noticed was that the captured TC via firwire seems to be 9 frames behind the "actual" TC on my burn-in.

I have mentioned this issue before, so hopefully Apple and JVC are working on simplifying the process.


If you capture everything "as is" and don't mess with TC rate, you should have no issues re-capturing later from the same camera.

Ok, good. You answered two questions.

1. My camera must be broken. (It WAS in VTR mode)

2. FCP isn't the perfect solution I thought it might be, so after I get the camera fixed, I'll continue to tangle in PC world for awhile. Maybe those solutions didn't work because of camera issues also.

Thank you. I REAAAAAALLLY appreciate it. I just spent my entire 10 day vacation tangling with this and you answered it in five minutes.

Good thing, too, because my warranty expires in a couple weeks.

-Spencer

Your computer is broken. Give it to me and I'll give you my 3 year old G5 in return. Just kidding.

Actually I thought FCP didn't support JVC 24P, only 30P. Has this changed?

Joe

It changed on September 26th, 2006. I remember the day well!

While I'm at it. The published minimums for Final Cut - do they really work? The published minimums for HD are single 1Gig G4 processor and 1 gig Ram. I've seen these or better on ebay for $600-$700. Do these truly work? What's the big downside? Reliability or render time? With Avid, you really don't have to render much until you are ready to output to video, but I seem to remember earlier version of Final Cut needing you to render audio whene ver it was moved around the timeline. Is that still true?

A 1Ghz G4 will require more rendering than a new Macbook Pro or MacPro with lots of RAM. My MacbookPro can handle many more realtime effects in HDV than my Dual1.2Ghz G4 can.

You will never have to render any audio if you have enough RAM and processor power to play the tracks in real-time. You can set the real-time preference in user settings.

Otherwise, any of these systems should be able to hande 720P HDV (19.2Mbps) without any problems.

Cool. I've been an Avid dude for over ten years, but... we'll see how long that lasts. They have been claiming that support for the 720P/24 HDV is "just around the corner" for 2 years now.

-Spencer

Yes they have. Don't expect any in the next release either because it's not coming.