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Changing timecode for high-framerate shots


Ian Berman

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Hi everyone, 

 

I’m wondering what you all do when camera switches from a standard frame rate (for me, usually 23.98 or 24) to a high framerate shot.

 

I encountered this the other day, where we were shooting 23.98 on an FX9 most of the day, but grabbed some B-roll (with dialogue) in 120fps on a Sony a7s.

 

I offered to switch timecode to 30fps across my tentacles, one of which was running audio tc into the a7s, the other was feeding my mixpre10. I figured this may be useful since 120 is divisible by 30. But the director said no, keep it at 23.98, as switching tc would create interpolation issues in post.

 

Obviously we still slated etc. but I’m wondering if switching to a timecode divisible by high fps shots is a standard practice, or if you usually keep the timecode consistent throughout a shoot?

 

thanks!

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Cameras don't run free run TC in high-frame rate, so it's not going to be locked/sync'd/jammed to anything else, anyway.  That being said, its TC will be based on its base frame rate/project frame rate, which sounds like it was 23.98.  And it wouldn't have accepted it anyway, because the camera would have been running in record run TC.  But you would have/could have thrown a monkey wrench in the works, especially if you forgot about the frame rate mismatch and the op switched the cam back from high-speed/over crank to real-time 23.98 and then the tentacle is trying to send it 29.97(cam probably would not have accepted it, though).

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7 minutes ago, RunAndGun said:

Cameras don't run free run TC in high-frame rate, so it's not going to be locked/sync'd/jammed to anything else, anyway.  That being said, its TC will be based on its base frame rate/project frame rate, which sounds like it was 23.98.  And it wouldn't have accepted it anyway, because the camera would have been running in record run TC.  But you would have/could have thrown a monkey wrench in the works, especially if you forgot about the frame rate mismatch and the op switched the cam back from high-speed/over crank to real-time 23.98 and then the tentacle is trying to send it 29.97(cam probably would not have accepted it, though).

That makes sense, I was just feeding it tc onto an audio track anyway so I'm assuming it would be pretty easy to just not use it if it was wrong. But that's good to know that high framerates are done with record run, and that I should just stick to the base project frame rate, for the future! 

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15 minutes ago, RunAndGun said:

And most cameras don’t record audio when shooting high-speed, so it still wouldn’t have gotten anything from you.

 

I often (semi) joke that my $30K-$40K+ broadcast/Cine cameras can’t record audio when over-cranking, but my $1K iPhone does.

Ha! Never knew that.

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