Red TC Fixer
June 4th, 2008
Scott Simmons at The Editblog has noticed a serious problem in the Red post workflow. There are two timecode tracks in R3D and their associated QT proxy files. One is known as “edge code” and is generated as rec run. It is continuous from the end of one shot to the beginning of the next. The other track is time of day. If your camera is set up to display edge code during shooting, QT will display edge code. If it’s displaying TOD, QT will display TOD.
I did some peeking under the hood, and it seems that the QT proxy files generated by the camera have two timecode tracks. The first track is whatever was displayed during shooting. If you delete Timecode Track 1, QT will now display the other type of timecode. If edge code was turned on in your clip and you delete Track 1, you’ll see TOD.
Unfortunately, right now it looks like there are a number of applications that are only looking at the TOD, so if you’re going to do an assembly it seems to make sense to work in TOD. If your production wasn’t aware of this problem and had edge code display turned on in camera, and you still want to work with proxies, I’ve made an AppleScript to delete the first TC track for all the QuickTime files in any directory and its subdirectories. Use with extreme caution. The script will permanently delete the first TC track from any QT file in its path. If you want the track back you have to regenerate the proxy files. I’ve done limited testing with this, and I’ve never worked with AppleScript before, so please be careful.
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