Response to Does it help to lay colour bars on DV or DVCAM tape before shooting?

DV and DVCAM tapes by definition do not have, nor do they require, a control track. I've read many forum entries written by people who are wasting valuable time "striping" or "black-bursting" their DV tapes, for continuous timecode and what they think is control track, essentially turning their stock into what broadcast oldtimers commonly refer to as "crystals" or "crystal blacks." The digital revolution, for lack of a better term, makes this unnecessary. There's a reason why the oldtimers were doing it- A) in most broadcast formats (Betacam SP / SX / and I think Digibeta too) you can't insert edit over a section of tape that lacks control track. At best, the edit will play in the machine that made it, but you'll almost always end up with a surprise when you try to playback that tape in any other machine. B) The old stuff, and even new non- linear edit systems, at best like to, and at worst NEED to see continuous timecode. Here's what you do. Lay bars over the first 30 seconds to minute of your tape with a preset timecode that makes some kind of sense-- I start at 23:59:40, lay :20 of bars, and start my footage right at 00:00:00-- this is my own habit. Most broadcast facilities choose 00:59:xx with the real stuff starting at one hour. At any rate, after you've laid your bars, leave your TC generator on regen and voila! Continuous timecode. As for your pixelation, if it's anything worse than DV / DVCAM's tendency to stairstep contrasty horizontal lines, or any other compression anomaly, you're in trouble. If it's big blotchy digital cubes across your footage, like I suspect, then you've got a malfunction somewhere (clogged heads?) and should have it checked out. --John Griffin

[ Previous | Next ]