Is my camera broken?
 

I have a GY-HD100UA and I'm having problems editing footage shot with it. (24P HDV) I'm starting to think the camera may have been shipped to me out of alignment.

Here's the issue. I've been trying to capture with the latest version of Liquid. The media APPEARS fine, but the timecode is off and it appears that total run time is off too.

When I press pause, it recognizes that frame perfectly, but when it's rolling, it drifts. (4 seconds over the course of an hour.)

It does not report dropped frames or breaks in the timecode.

When I go to record "Live" I can see the timecode ticking away on the screen. Every single second, the numbers flip to all Pound signs (##:##.##,##).

There are similar TC read problems with the latest version of Premiere.

Has anyone come accross this? Has anyone recorded using the "LIVE" function with Liquid at 24PHDV and can tell me if this is to be expected? (I went through the entire list of available TC for it to expect to see and it responded the same on all)

Thanks.

-Spencer

A 4 second drift over the period of an hour screams DROP FRAME vs NON-DROP FRAME Timecode. (The exact variance will be 3.6 seconds)

24P must use NDF timecode - there is no way around it. I've never used Liquid, but I would suspect that it assumes a default DF TC - which is wrong.

In FCP and Avid you can tell a clip to change its timecode mode. I assume Liquid must have a similar function.

Yeah, that was my first instinct too. But both camera and editor are set to non-drop.

Then maybe your clip frame rate is set to 24fps instead of 23.976 fps. This would cause the exact same variance.

Yeah, that was my second thought. Not it. Both set to 23.976 non-drop. After capturing the properties of the clip claim the same.

How are you confirming the 4 second drift? Are you shooting a stopwatch or clock? NDF will always be 3.6 seconds out from "real-time" per every hour.
That's why DF TC is necessary for mastering.

The timecode drifts between the tape and Liquid.

Near the beginning, at a particular frame, the tape labels it:

00:00:01:17

while Liquid labels the same frame

00:00.02,11

(liquid is 18 frames later)

Near the end, at a particular frame, the tape labels it:

01:00:04:04

while Liquid labels that same frame

01:00.02,13

(Liquid is 1 sec 15 frames slow)

This means that besides being wrong, the timecode drifts 2sec 9frames over the course of an hour.

I ran this test a couple times and the resulting TC in Liquid was inconsistent. Sometimes a frame would be labelled one thing, other times, it would be labelled another.

By the way, the colon, period, comma thing in the Liquid TimeCode is their way of labelling TC as 23.976 non-drop.