16mm Film Audio Transfer

Overview Currently we are transferring 16mm film using the Retro-16 Pro to scan the film and the Sniper-16 HD to scan the optical audio.  After scanning, I drop the Retro16 footage on the Vegas timeline and the Sniper footage with audio on the Vegas timeline below.  The audio will be sync'ed up with the footage from the Sniper...now we need to sync the audio to the footage from the Retro.  The Sniper footage can be a big help, as you can line up the frames between the Sniper and Retro footage.

Notes:

The audio track should be the "master" and you should not really change the audio track speed or length, etc.  Change the Retro footage....much simpler.

Sync Procedure

1. Drop footage from both Retro and Sniper onto the timeline.  The Sniper will automatically include the audio track.
2. Find the middle of the footage and mark it...preferably at a scene change.
3. Go to the end and check the footage sync....mark scene changes
4. Go to the start and find a scene change and mark it
5. If the scenes are in sync, your done....if not continue
6. I went through the timeline and marked the Retro and Sniper video scene selections.
   1. I used "sync" for the Sniper and "SYNC" for the Retro.
   2. I also made a note in the Retro mark of the distance between the marks.
7. In my example I found the last 60% of the footage was in sync and the first 40% was not
   1. The 40% not in sync was about 27 seconds out at the start and the gap between the outage narrowed to 0 seconds by the time we were 40% into the footage.  To bad there is no graduated stretch.
   2. I basically cut up the 40% into scenes and stretched each scene...this meant each scene would be a decreasing stretch, in my case, as we approached the 40% mark.
   3. I started by finding the first scene change and splitting it.
   4. Then I moved the scene so the start lined up with the Sniper footage.
   5. Then I stretched the footage on the right until the footage lined up with the end of the Sniper scene.
   6. Then I checked to make sure the audio was in sync for this scene.
   7. I continued this cut, line-up, stretch until the 40% footage was done.
   8. Then I checked to make sure the audio was in sync for the entire footage.

Timecode Sync

Being able to sync events on the timeline according to timecode is a feature that is built into Vegas, and would automatically synchronize clips with zero effort. I took some time to research different timecode settings for the Canon XH-A1’s, and ended up performing a few tests. Typically we are running the camera in the default “REC-RUN” format, and I switched it to “FREE-RUN”, which, when synchronized with the second camera, means that both cameras are always displaying the exact same timecode because the counter is always running. Even if the battery is removed. It’s running off the ‘backup-battery’ technically which also basically keeps track of the clock.

The problem turned out not to be on the camera end, as the timecode recording worked great no-matter which setting you had it on. The problem lied within Vegas, as when I looked at the imported clips in the Project Media dialogue, each clip’s “Timecode In” started at 00:00:00:00. This means that the timecode information wasn’t being captured with Vegas’s built in video capture program.

Also, there is an option to synchronize clips according to the date and time stamps, but Vegas didn’t appear to import these either. Online research revealed that it’s even possible to get information from the camera such as the F stop, shutter speed, gain, and more!

In conclusion, I believe that all of this will be fixed in future releases, or with the next camera (probably being tapeless). For now, it’s not a huge issue when we line it up by audio wave-forms, so we won’t make it a priorty to find alternate software to capture this special XIFF data.

As a quick last side note, it looked like Edius might be able to do it.

UPDATE May 12, 2009

After upgrading to Vegas 9.0 the other day, I noticed timecodes in the media bins in vegas!  I played around with it a little and it appears that Vegas can now read the timecode information on all the clips that have been imported from the XH-A1's.  It will need to be tested a little further, but it could become a massive time-saver.