#Flyer Brochure
Brian,
Some of your message appears garbled so I didn't get all of what you are
asking. But WRT timecode, I didn't notice at NAB that they were
controlling decks with time code, but then they were getting new revs of
software seemingly every hour.
My own sort of never-gave-it-a-second-thought assumption was that they
have to support time code, otherwise it is not an editor. For example,
the primary aquisition and distribution medium is tape. Editors will want
to get tape segments into the NLE by time code if they are not reading in
the entire tape. If you read the entire thing in a high compression
"draft" resolution for "offline" EDL development, you are still going to
come up with the problem of designating which full resolution segments you
want to read in for the final edit. Then there is the problem of being
able to insert segments onto tape with pre-existing scenes you do not want
disturbed. That has to be done fram accuratly for professional use.
I know Tim Jennison absolutely HATES tape. But I believe he knows we are
as far away from tapeless video as we are from the paperless office. And
if the Flyer could not handle frame accurate capture and output, it would
not be an editor. It would merely be a video compositer.
Alot of people don't understand NLE because they take the computer disk
file analogy incorrectly. If you think of the frames of video like hard
disk sectors instead of focusing on clips as files, it makes a little more
sense. Clips and Files are logical constructs used to designate a
temporal collection of frames or disk sectors. The process of NLE is a
little different than transferring files on PCs for most of us (systems
programmers aside). We never get concerned about the blocks directly. In
NLE we have to explicitly allocate the frames to clips, and the frames are
time-code designated. Another difference is that clips can overlap, where
files cannot. (That is a situation called 'cross-linked files' and is bad
news on a hard drive.) And, on output, once again, we have to tell the
clips as composited, butted, transitioned, trimmed, and overlapped, which
frames to end up on on the tape. Whereas in computer land, when you copy
a group of files to a floppy, you don't care which sectors from the HD end
up in which sectors on the floppy as long as they are properly linked to a
logical definition – the file name. the Non-linearity of video actually
exceeds that of computer files in its basic nature, so it will be along
time before anyone will produce a high-end editor where time coding of
frames is 'transparent' to the editor, me thinks (especially as long as TV
advertising is still sold by the second…).
wmc – via Autopilot!