Smpte In Logic Pro, Film Scoring and time code Options

[hahaworld]

Dear Friends,

I am scoring a very low-budget film in Logic Pro. They have given me the movie on mini-dv tapes which I have downloaded to iMovie and converted to QuickTime for use in the video track in Logic. My question is, since the mini-dv tapes do not have timecode on them, what are my options for using timecode to ensure that my scoring lines up exactly where I mean it to when I send the audio to the film company? All they have requested from me is an audio CD with the tracks numbered and the scenes that the tracks go with indicated on the CD. Thanks for any thoughts!

[hahaworld]

Dear Friends,

I'm kind of new to timecode, and I'd like to learn how to stamp timecode to video projects I'm scoring in Logic 7. Any comments would be welcome. Thanks!

[gdoubleyou]

DV has it's own embedded timecode, as long as you have the correct framerate, and format(NTSC/PAL), you should be good to go.



Also checkout for DV knowledge. http://www.macvideopro.com/
the Digital Media Network has several Mac specific sites and forums, they also have several sites on video, film and audio.



This post has been edited by gdoubleyou: Wed 8 Mar 2006, 22:07

[cornutt]

The main use of time code in video and audio production is to help syncrhonize program material that is coming from different sources. When you record an audio or video or MIDI track on your computer, it embeds the time code as digital data in such a way that you don't see it in the program, but it's there. It uses this internally to synchronize the different tracks when you do a mixdown, or add a sountrack to video, or such. Typically, the production software (sequencer, audio/video editor, etc.) has a separate window where it will show you the time code for the current time.

There is a second form of time code, in which the time is encoded as an audible signal. You can actually listen to it -- it sounds sort of like a modem making a connection. Back in the bad old days, when stuff was on tape, time code was often put onto an audio track at the beginning of production; this was known as "striping" the tape. For example, if you had a four-track audio tape deck, you'd probably put the time code on track 4 (an edge-of-the-tape track, to reduce crosstalk). The tape machine could then use it to show the operator the current position, seek to a specific place on the tape, or (very important in the '80s) sync the tape machine to a second machine, so that they play together and one doesn't run faster than the other. When computers first came into use in audio production, most of them didn't have enough horsepower to record audio or video; they could only record MIDI. The early MIDI interfaces had the ability to read a time code off of a tape and supply MIDI clock to the computer so that its MIDI sequencing stayed in sync with the tape. I did many mixdowns this way back in the early '90s, when my computer was a measly Mac IIcx; I'd play some MIDI tracks, mix them to tape, then play more MIDI tracks in sync with the tape and mix that. The audible form of the time code isn't used so much any more since computers, hard disk recorders, and digital tape machines like ADATs have the ability to embed a digital time code in the data and it doesn't take up a track, and most of us don't futz around with analog tape much any more.

The SMPTE time code counts time a little funny, since it's designed to be used for film and video production. Starting from some arbitrary zero time, it counts time in hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. There are four different variations of how the frames are counted, and each one is intended to be used with different visual media:

* 24 frames per second: This is the theatrical film standard.
* 25 frames per second: For use with PAL-format video, which is what is used in most of Europe and Asia.
* 30 frames per second: An older standard intended for U.S. black-and-white television. However, some music producers who don't have any intention of syncing their stuff to video use it, because it makes the math easy.
* The weird one is called "30 drop". It's for use with NTSC color television (U.S., Canada, Japan). This standard is odd because the frame rate doesn't divide neatly into seconds; the rate is something like 29.97 frames per second. If you try to use regular 30 fpm time code, at the end of an hour of wall-clock time, your time code would be about 15 seconds off. So what the 30-drop code does is skip the 28th or 29th frames at certain points within each hour, so that the time code stays within a fraction of a second of the wall-clock time. The difficulty it causes is that if you have to calculate the exact number of frames between two time references, it's a non-trivial task to look up all the skip points in a table. Fortunately, most applications have SMPTE time calculators that will do the math for you these days.

You may at times hear of "MIDI time code", or MTC for short. This is just a way of encoding the SMPTE code into a string of MIDI messages; the code itself is the same.

You might also at some point run into the IRIG time codes, IRIG-A and B being the most common. The military and NASA use these a lot.

[hahaworld]

Wow! Thank you so much for this information. It really opened my mind up a lot. I really appreciate the help, and hope I can return the favor someday!

[lepetitmartien]

I merged the threads, only one topic is enough