Originally posted on The Editblog.
I recently got suckered into a low budget music video. How low budget? The decision was made not to hire an audio person for playback. Without that audio person it meant there would be no audio master made for the song and no timecode slate for syncing later in post. What was the solution? Use an iPod with video and make our own timecode slate!
We dropped the audio into a timeline and then applied a timecode generator to a slug for one version of the song and color bars to another. This was done so we would know what version of the song we were working with at a glance. It was also handy to have the timecode on the iPod video screen in that we put visual cues like chorus, bridge, solo to know where in the song we were.
Timecode is always something to think about as we were shooting in 720p60 and of course the iPod doesn’t support that so sync was a bit off when the clips were brought in. But since the camera recorded the audio playback with the camera mic there was always an audio reference to help with sync. What I did was to first drop in the actual piece of video we put on the iPod into a timeline. It didn’t matter that it needed rendering as I just needed to see the numbers. I assigned the master timecode of the timeline to match. It didn’t really match since we shot at 59.94 but if you were shooting at 29.97 it would match perfectly and you could skip the next step. Then I dropped all the performance takes (there wasn’t too many of them) into a timeline, using the iPod display to get the clip nearly into sync. I then adjusted the clip to get the sync just right and then assigned each of the takes an auxiliary timecode, made a multiclip (I was using Final Cut Pro) grouping via aux timecode and you have a multiclip group with all of your takes. Voila! Instant music video, no timecode slate needed… though I still prefer a professional audio pack with a real timecode slate at if all possible.
One little gotcha that is worth noting if you are going to use an iPod with video as a poor-man’s timecode slate on your next video shoot. Be sure that you set the Burn-in-timecode to begin at 01:00:00:00 (1 hour). Besides this being the standard for program start times and how professional audio packs are made, if you have it start at a zero hour 00:00:00:00 as was done with one of our slates:
you will have problems with grouping through auxiliary timecode…. at least when using Final Cut Pro. When your timecode begins at 00:00:00:00 and you assign that auxiliary timecode to your clips, FCP will have to adjust where the clips are synced in order to get them into proper sync. When it has to move the clip backward then it moves into 23:59:59:00 timecode range and it will screw-up the grouping.
This is how properly aux coded clips are supposed to line up:
You can see the alignment of all the clips and how they fall into the proper place within the sequence. The takes that are just the bridge (like [1]-11, [2]-09, [6]-12) fall in the 3rd quarter of the song. These would have been impossible to group with the first verse ([12]-06, [13]-08, [14]-13) using just an IN or OUT point as there is no overlap. Ahhh the joy of auxiliary timecode!
This is how FCP wants to line them up if you have 00:00:00:00 auxiliary code in the clip:
As you can see that is not a proper multiclip group. The moral of this story… don’t use 00:00:00:00 timecode!
Originally posted on The Editblog.
