Results tagged “timecode” from Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming

The media management tool in Final Cut Pro can be quite confusing.  One VERY important thing to note is that the Media Management tool will not work with clips that do not contain time-code. 

To verfiy this, take a look at the Media Start Columnto make sure each clip has actual time-code values other than 00:00:00:00.  This is a real drag if you plan on using clips that inherently do not have timecode.  (i.e. background animations, music from CD's, and multimedia movies),

As you can see in this screenshot, these particular clips do not have timecode information.  Therefore the Media Manager will not work correctly with these clips.

Fortunately, there is a trick to add time-code back into the clips. 

You can use one of two methods.

#1  Edit all your clips to a sequence.  Set the sequence start time, and then export a self-contained QuickTime movie.  Then re-import the movie into Final Cut Pro.  The clip(s) will now work correctly within the Media Manager.  *Do not export using QuickTime Conversion, because it will not preserve the FCP sequence timecode. 

#2 For the die-hard tech geeks, you can use the QuickTime Developer tool to create a timecode track and manually change or add time-code information to each individual QuickTime movie.

After you've confirmed that all your clips have actual embedded timecode information, the Media Management tool will work correctly.

I have been asked many times to explain the difference between Drop Frame and Non-Drop Frame. I found a fairly detailed explanation the will hopefully help you understand the difference. US TVs display 29.97 frames a second. When NTSC was defined, they found out there were some problems with the video signal carrier fequency running at 30 frames per second (fps). So they decided to shift things by 1/1000 to 29.97 fps which is 0.999 of 30 fps.The two of the more commonly used combinations of time display settings are 30 fps drop-frame timecode and 30 fps non-drop-frame timecode. When the frame rate is a non-integer number as is the case with the NTSC frame rate of 29.97 frames per second a compromise of one sort or another must be made in displaying time. Either the time display can accurately show clock time (after one hour, the time display shows 1:00:00:00) or the time display can be continuously numbered (frame n is always followed by frame n + 1, modulo the number of frames per second). Drop-frame timecode does the former; non-drop-frame timecode does the latter. In the case of NTSC 30 fps drop-frame timecode, two frame numbers are skipped for each minute, except for every tenth minute. Drop-frame timecode is conventionally indicated by separating the time units with semicolons. The most common case for which drop-frame versus non-drop-frame timecode is relevant is 29.97 fps NTSC, but it also applies to 23.976 fps and 59.94 fps.