How to Set up Time Code

Real World Tips for the Professional Producer by Paul Martingell

SETTING UP TIME-CODE

Time-code is the reference point on the tape or hard disk that follows right through the whole production process. Lots of people rely on it and if it goes wrong, becomes nonsequential, or jumps, then it affects viewing, off-line editing, graphics, sound dubs, and on-line editing and causes an awful lot of bad language from video editors, which I’ve found to my cost…

Think of it like this: when you’ve shot your lovely footage of a Ferrari coming around a couple of hairpin bends, say you’ve done five separate takes of the same thing, and you decide to use the start of take one along with the end of take three. The best way to let everybody else in the team know exactly what shots you want used in the edit is to give them time-code numbers, which are individual to every frame you have recorded; then you don’t have to explain it in words many times over.

Basically the four fields of time-code in your LCD screen or viewfinder reflect hours, minutes, seconds, and fields so every shot has its unique reference point and time-code number. They look like something this: 02:10:19:11.

You can set your camera to run time-code in two ways: record run, which is when you press the record button on the camera, it will start and it will then stop when you turn the record button to off; or secondly to free run, when the code runs constantly whether the camera is recording or not. And there are few good reasons why you can choose one setting over the other.

Standard Location Single Camera Shooting

When you start shooting a project and you know you will record more than one tape and you will be moving from location to location, the industry standard would be to start with time-code on tape one at 01:00:00:00. You would use the “ record run ” setting on the time-code and the code would only be laid down as you hit the record button and stop when you stopped recording. Every time you change tapes, you dial in the next tape number on the first two digits, i.e., 02:00:00:00 then the next tape starts with the digits 03: the next tape with 04: etc., so everyone involved in the production process now knows that the tape box, or hard disk box, labeled 01 matches up with the tape that has time-code starting with 01. When you view the many tapes you’ve shot and write down your rough edit list then you know it’s the first one. When the offline editor wants to start the first cut he knows it’s tape one, day one. When the on-line editor comes to assemble the show he knows it’s tape one, day one. When the graphics guy wants to find the rushes so he can quickly pull off the right frame, he knows it’s tape one…Everyone knows where to find the exact shot on tape one recorded on day one and it saves loads of time, even when the tape is put back in the wrong box…

Another point worth remembering is that it’s always good practice to record 10–30 seconds of bars at the head of each new tape or disk, and if you can also put tone on the audio tracks at the same time then the video editor can line up his edit machines to your bars and adjust the audio levels to read the same.

So Why Bother with Continuous Time-Code?

The following are the two reasons.

RUNNING TWO CAMERAS TOGETHER IS AN EFFECTIVE WAY TO

RECORD IMPORTANT INTERVIEWS

The benefits are that there is no need to record any reverses or, the presenter’s questions or reactions after the main interview has happened, and you get a more accurate recording of the event. Now you can do this using record run time-code as we looked at above, but if you use this method there will be different time-codes recorded on both cameras as it’s almost impossible to keep them running together with synchronous time-code. So using free run timecode you can record exactly the same time-code onto both cameras/tapes/disks. This means that the video editor can edit in and out of both tapes at exactly the same point using the time-code from either camera and without having to search visually for a matching edit point, which makes the edit so much smoother and faster.

To set this up you:

■ Decide which camera will be the master camera

■ Switch this camera’s time-code to the free run position

■ Plug in a BNC cable to the time-code output socket of this camera

■ Plug the other end into the time-code input socket of the second, slave,

camera

■ Then switch the slave camera to free run as well

■ Check that the slave camera is now reading exactly the same time-code as

the master camera

■ When this is confirmed unplug the BNC lead from both cameras

■ If either camera has to change batteries resync the code using the same process as above as this can cause the time-code settings to drift apart

RECORDING AN EVENT THAT RELIES ON TIME OF DAY

A big conference or music concert where certain acts or events happen over a planned period of time might be better recorded with time of day, free run code, as standard, especially if more than one camera is being used. Again the editor can use the synchronous time-code on each and any camera tape and simply mark an edit point using this code rather than searching for a visual matchup of the action on different cameras.

The only drawback to time of day code used to be that it took longer for the cameras to lock up after pressing the record button, but that’s not a problem on long events.

ANY OTHER PROBLEMS WITH TIME-CODE

If you have a gap in your time-code, you might have played back a good take to show the producer in the camera and not cued it up at the last frame when the viewing has ended; then some edit suites will have problem handling the gap in time-code which will stop the machine performing a clean edit. They use the time-code to control their tape position and gaps can confuse them. Also on nonlinear suites the machines can simply stop playing in the rushes if they come across a time-code gap and you’ll end up with nothing there, just black space. So for such a simple little thing you can now see that there are pitfalls to be aware of.

DROP FRAME TIME-CODE

Just to complicate matters you need to be aware that time-codes used in America for NTSC recording come in two distinct flavors: drop frame and nondrop frame.

The U.K. system, which is PAL time-code, is at 25 fps but the U.S. NTSC timecode is at 29.97 fps, which means you need to know about drop frame and nondrop frame time-code modes.

This rate of 29.97 fps is slightly slower than the 30 fps, which would then tie in happily with the U.S. frequency rate. This rate was decided upon when the changeover from black and white to color video was happening and the added color information would sometimes clash with other parts of the signal such as the audio. So the existing audio rate was left the same but the video parts were altered. As the rate of 29.97 fps is less than the 30 fps, a small time discrepancy over any length of video will happen, so a method of compensating for this was worked out; drop frame is the way chosen to deal with it.

Time-code recorded in drop frame mode only drops the code numbers that match the frames of video captured, not the actual frames of video themselves.

It is an industry recognized SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television

Engineers) code that runs accurately over normal clock time and loses, or drops, two frames of code (every 60 seconds apart from every 10 minutes where it jumps then). This compensation allows it to keep to normal clock time. You can recognize drop frame code being played on video machinery as the viewable digits are separated by semicolons in the display screen like this: 01;00;00;00, whereas nondrop frame code uses colons in between the numbers like this:

03:00:00:00.

NONDROP FRAME RECORDING

Nondrop frame recording, which is again an SMPTE code, doesn’t use this compensation, and relates with 30 fps. This method means that it does not match clock time exactly and the length of a video section is always shorter. For every 10 minutes, there will be an 18 frame difference. TV stations taking in NTSC recorded programs for transmission will normally require the master tapes to have drop frame time-code.