Capturing clips in FCP Studio 2

V

vulogov

New member
Greetings,

I encounter a strange problem. I have 30p footage, FCP Studio 2, AG-DV2500 deck. I load tape in the deck, mark end of the clip, rewind tape to the beginning, mark begin of clip, click "Capture clip". Deck starts to shuffle tape back and forth around start of the clip and after few tries FCP says "Reach end of the tape" and set "Mark in" and "Mark out" to the same value. Although I can capture by just clicking "Capture->Now" and hit "Play" button on the deck. But I do not feel I am doing capture "the right way". Can you help me to find out of what and where I am doing wrong.

Thank you,
Vladimir
 
Sounds like you have a massive time code break in there.

Is the tape really one long clip, or are you just capturing the whole tape at once for time's sake?
 
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The tape I have is one long clip (recordings of the live concerts). In most cases I tape begin->to->end. I discovered one exception from general "rule of thumb": if I try to capture 00:00:01:00 I definitely will not be able to capture it through Capture clip, only through Capture now. If I play tape for something 15-60 seconds, sometimes it works as "Capture clip"


And I do not mix tape vendors and types, I connect deck straight to the Mac, no hubs or daisy chain.
 
Thank you. Seems like this will do.

Other rather strange problem occurs to me today. When capturing recent tapes, 1 out of 5 starts to have symptoms as "dead". Dropped frames, lost TC and all other characteristics bad tape media or troubles with camera. Well, I exit FCP. Restarted Mac and all ill effects are now gone. I also see this problem once in a while, but sometimes it's just requires to reload FCP, sometimes reboot machine. The host itself is FCP dedicated. I do not have any active backup or external firewire devices other than deck. Is this host ? deck ? camera ? tape ? Or me being stupid problem ?
 
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DJDecay said:
It's sounds like lack of pre-roll on the tape, you need some room to get the tape capture going on some mechanisms as the shuttle rewind past the point of TC, when TC is absent FCP thinks its capturing nothing and stops (not on all decks) - mostly the ones where VTR control is sent over firewire.- typically when filming to tape - I'd run the tape for about a minute+ filming _nothing_ just to avoid this exact problem.
Click to expand...

Doing this on already-exiting footage risks taping over crucial footage if not enough pre-roll is already there.

You can go into your capture preferences and set your pre-roll to 2 seconds (default is 5), or even 1 second, in cases like this. I'd duplicate the capture setting, modify the pre-roll, and title the duplicate setting to something like "tight pre-roll."

For the future, you should always, always, always be rolling 30 seconds of color bars at the head of every tape (if your camera has no bars, roll black). This serves several functions, one of which is to make sure you have plenty of pre-roll space for the first clip. Also, the first stretch of tape is most susceptible to damage over time in storage and in use as there's a lump that forms where the tape is anchored into the hub; that lump smooths out after a few layers are wound around it.
 
I do have independent TV and audio from a deck. Which brings me to another question: is it possible for me to "overload" firewire as I am using "Apple Firewire NTSC (720x480)" for Video playback and "Audio follows video". Shall I assign it to something else during the capture ?

Guys, you were such a help ! Thank you.
 
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