Yes, I can thoroughly recommend Excalibur, but synching the video events themselves is not really the issue - I need to display the master SMPTE timecode, recorded on one of the two audio tracks on each camera.

I can't find any info to say that Vegas is able to read SMPTE - I hope with it's strong audio pedigee, it is able to...

Andy

No, Vegas cannot read SMPTE recorded on an audio track.

John

Ahh - a pretty definate "no" then.

That's a great shame - and surprising, too - I thought it would be something Vegas would handle without blinking.

Any Sony folk care to comment?

Am I trying to do something technically tricky for Vegas... or something only a chump would want to do anyway ;-) ?

Any workarounds for this situation?

All the best,

Andy

> That's a great shame - and surprising, too - I thought it would be something Vegas would handle without blinking.


In my experience no NLE supports reading TC from an audio track. The last time I've ever experienced that was with the old 3/4" decks (before the age of Betacam!). Recording TC on an audio track is a specialized way to go now that TC is done a little differently.

A workaround would be to dub the material from your source to betacam and read the TC from your audio track to the VITC or SMPTE TC track on the betacam. Then do a capture with RS232 deck control using the capture util that came with your card (ie: digitools if you're using Digisuite like I do). Or to save a generation daisychain two decks... your source feeding a betacam slaved to the source ... but that's uncharted territory for me! :)

- R

Audio track of which? Camera, DAT, MD, or what? Using any SMPTE to MTC converter, Vegas can slave to it, or master the device if the device accepts an external master. But you cannot put SMPTE audio on the timeline of Vegas and have Vegas read it. Nothing I'm aware of does this.

To jump in here -

I am not aware of any *internal* TC reader that will read a recorded TC audio track. However external coming into a NLE there are options. Vegas will not do it without some sort of Midi TC reader/interface. I have an AEC box that works great - but not with vegas. I can run audio TC or VITC TC into it and as long as the NLE reads serial port/deck control it works great.

Studio 16 was great in that it had a card that had a seperate TC input. it was also great in that you could enter in TC info on the *audio* itself and it would snap into sync based on your timeline. If Vegas could somehow add that feature it would be lite years ahead of anything currently out there pirce wise. (If you are having a hard time understanding that - currently look at a video track - you can enter TC info for that media. However you can not do it for audio. So imagine this - syncing dailes. You could type in the TC slate clap mark on both the audio and the video - and they would lock into sync. But I am old school in thinking like film and edge numbers/coding for sync dailes.TC is an offshoot of this, Studio 16 used it in a great way. Vegas does not - because it does not do this)

This sort of feature does seem to have serious needs, I notice all the pro audio gear will record TC from an external source and I can see an definate need for it. If you want to record surround sound then you can only do that with an external recorder. You feed that TC from the camera or lock them both to an external TC generator but you still have no way to lock them once you get it back into Vegas.
But there's another stumbling block, they also record in BWF so your sunk two ways trying to do this. Sigh.

Actually I'm surprised the audio guys aren't all over this anyway, how do they cope with locking mixes to TC? Surely if they were mixing for film or a pro video this would be mission critical stuff.

Bob.

I do mix for pro video/film (usually for video) this is NOT the problem it's being made it out to be.
Whether recording on a DA88 in field for surround (only done this a coupla times) or whether creating a surround mix, Vegas can control or slave to anything via MTC converted to SMPTE. Always has, Sound Forge even had a T/C trigger/Freewheel 11 years ago. Acid syncs too.
The issue that is being asked about is, can you take a SMPTE stripe and put it on an audio track, and slave Vegas to it. Nothing does this internally at most any price point. That said....

Because this thread got me curious, I DID record a stripe to a track.
Then, using busing, sent that OUT to an M-Audio Delta, and used the output to lockup a DA98. Worked wonderfully. I had to tweak the output settings of the audio stripe, but it worked. So...I suppose if someone wanted to do the backwards thing, or needed an audio stripe out, then it WILL work, but it's silly to do. And unnecessary.
Vegas can act as a master or slave. It simply uses MTC rather than LTC.
If you are REALLY serious about controlling Vegas with a DV cam, you can buy a Rosendahl unit, I forget the model#, and it will read DV TC and spit out MTC, LTC, or even FSK, deriving T/C from the LANC control.
EVERYTHING we sent out for film, from Samurai to PBS spots is locked to picture via T/C when it leaves here, whether it's OMF, pulsetone, or on a DA referencing the T/C provided by the scorist or director. Offsets are achieved in Vegas.
None of this is half the issue that this thread has for some reason, brought it to be. MTC is perfectly fine for this sort of work, and I can't think of any of the DAC boxes that DON'T convert SMPTE to MTC. Aardvark to Zeus, M-Audio to Echo, MOTU to ESI all do this.

SPOT - just wondering because never heard anyone else talk about it around here but me and I figure if anyone would have used it it would be you - did you ever use the Studio 16 set up for the Amiga? The reason I first looked at Vegas was because, for me, it was somewhat close to how Studio 16 worked audio wise. Now I know it does work midi > Smpte and back again but is there way that I have not yet found to take audio and enter in a TC offset the same way that you could in Studio 16? (And if you never used it - never mind that question just read below.)

Just for a referance - the last film I used Studio 16 for was maybe 6 years ago. I had a VHS dub with window burn and SMPTE on track 2. I ran that out to the Studio 16 card. I laid in all my effects and ambiance and M&G tracks. I had a DA-88 for output to individual tracks. Along that way I got another DA-88 tape with the music score on it. I mixed that down to another DA-88 for a seperate Stereo music track. Now I got another DA-88 tape sent out that had all the ADR on it. So - for the final mix I was running the VHS dub's track 2 into the DA-88 and that was locking to the other DA-88 and the Studio 16...all tracks were running to a mixing board and back out one of the DA-88's. So by workflow there I would love to replace the studio 16 with Vegas. In this sense video never gets onto the hard drive and would only be using Vegas for the audio. All sync would be coming off of a video source...and right now I do not see any way to enter tc info on just an audio track in Vegas. In studio 16 one of the great things was that you could capture audio and it would also capture the TC with it. You could enter (manually) the offset on the audio track. The project timelime was set up so when you dropeed a piece of audio onto the timeline it would automaticly go to the correct place. Vegas does not have the ability to do this right? Or have missed somehting all these years?

Well....yes and no. Studio 16 WAS great, wasn't it? I slave Vegas to my Beta deck using TC coming off the deck to control it. Then I can offset Vegas however I want to.
But, for the interest of this thread, I recorded a T/C stripe into Vegas as an audio track.
then sent the track to external output, sent to the Lynx, which is our house sync device. I can't see any way of offsetting the recorded T/C, because it contains the location information in the stripe, so any where you put it, that's where it is...I guess that's a kludged way of offsetting, but only the receiving unit would show the T/C generated by the stripe. Vegas will only show it's current T/C point. You could also offset Vegas to match where you put the T/C stripe, but that wouldn't generate accurate T/C display in Vegas either.
For me, it's easiest to let Vegas generate MTC and send it to the SY88 or DA88/98 and let Vegas control the DA.
You can use a house sync like the Lynx and I guess the Rosendahl as a house master, converting MTC to SMPTE, controlling whatever you need, which is what we do when we don't bring the vid into the computer. Frankly, I've gotten pretty used to capturing vid, slugs and all, because it saves rewind time...I HATE rewinding and waiting. :-)

SPOT,
thanks for the heads up on the MTC input. Wasn't trying to be a nark.
Just that TC is a bit of an open wound where I work, seems to cause everyone stress that works with DV so I'm always trying to get the lowdown on each and everyway to solve the problem in all its manifestations.
I agree that decoding a LTC signal off an audio track in Vegas is a kind of pointless exercise. I'd imagine it'd be a no brainer to do it but having decoded it what could be done with it would be the issue.
I'll look into some of the boxes you mentioned, might be worthwhile adding them to our arsenal, we have a few gismos that'll do VTC to LTC conversion as well as insert / extract from SDI and firewire but none that I know of that'll I/O MTC.

SPOT,
just spent a few minutes looking at what they have to offer. I guess it's like a lot of these kind of 'glue' gadgets, those in the know already have one and those who aren't flounder around trying to work out how the other guys can get it to work and they can't.
Between the range of units they have I think I can see a solution for just about every TC issue I've seen clients struggle with.

Bob..

Firstly, many thanks to everyone for shedding some light on this subject.
Until now, I haven't really had a use for some sort of master timecode within a DV project - even with multiple cameras, it's easy to synch them up using a marker point.
However, in the particular circumstance we've just been dealing with - recording a recording session with multiple DV cameras and many tracks of audio - a master timecode seemed the only way of keeping the project together. The audio tracks were recorded and will be edited in ProTools by the recording engineer at the studio; I'll be doing the picture edits beforehand in Vegas at a seperate location - the house SMPTE recorded at the time will (hopefully) be the 'glue' that binds it together.
In this case, I have to disagree that "decoding a LTC signal off an audio track in Vegas is a kind of pointless exercise" - it would be extremely useful.

For example, right now, I need to check a couple of audio glitches in the mono audio mix recorded on the cameras - how can I tell the engineer (who's in another town) which section of the ProTools session to look at without some point of reference? He hasn't got the pictures to go by.
I'm going to have to drive over to the studio to pick up the SMTE unit, take an audio feed out of my M-Audio 1010 into it and get it to display TC, before I can tell him where the problem might be. So much easier if Vegas could just read the SMPTE.

NOTHING reads smpte off the timeline, no NLE reads it like that either. So while it would be 'easier' it's also not possible with most any current tool. Where is the T/C derived from? If it's a DV cam, it's not SMPTE and they're not locked together. So you'd be doing this anyway. This is one place where genlocked cams are the only real solution if you want it to be all locked to time.