Saturday 11 December 2010

The Perils of LP mode

With any luck someone else has experienced this problem and can suggest a solution, because I've never come across it and it's weird.

A friend of mine asked me to transfer video of their granddaughter's nativity play on to DVD. Fine, no problems - just run it through Final Cut Express, grab the out put and put it onto a Disc. Easy.

Errm... No.

It was filmed in LP mode, and although I've used the camera that they used to film it to capture it, I've had all sorts of problems sorting it out.

My Final Cut Express set up is usually optimised for working with the Sony Z1/5 or PD150 cameras. So I had to change a lot of settings to suit the little JVC camcorder that was used. Only 12bit sound first, which caused a bit of a surprise when you're used to everything being in 16bit at least. No problem, quick setting change and off we go again.

Now it's out of sync! Nearly a whole second out with the image in front of the soundtrack. No problem there either, just cut the offending difference off the front of the vision clip and shuffle it forward until it matches the sound. Great. Hit Render.

And it comes out Green. Not just green tint, but Green. Solid Green. Green and nothing else. I like Green, but the video shouldn't look like that!!

Fiddle with settings, now I've got random visuals. The same still keeps appearing and rapidly flashing with another one like bad stop motion.

I've got no idea at all what's going on with this. Usually when I capture something there are none of these problems! I'm sure it's something to do with the LP mode but I've no idea what. Any suggestions, Cyberspace?

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Update : Managed to re-capture it using the DV-Convert setting but it still came out out of sync. I've never known this sort of problem to happen before, so suggestions very welcome.

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