Index Mark.

farss wrote on 4/27/2009, 1:45 PM
I may have found a solution to a problem that's bugged me for years, the Index Mark button on almost every Sony camera.
Now the question is, how can I find where the index mark is on the Vegas timeline.
If this data is lost, is there any hope that one day it will be preserved. Having it show up as a marker would be the ants pants.


Maybe I'm the first person to ask for this in Vegas, maybe that's because I don't know what it does or maybe it's not common knowledge how useful this feature could be. Either way seems a topic worth some discussion. Certainly getting it to work with Vegas would be worth something to me i.e. I'd pay for it.

Bob.

Comments

farss wrote on 4/28/2009, 5:55 PM
Bit of a shamless bump.

What I'm talking about here is a mechanism that lets a cameraperson put an invisible mark into what he's shooting so that an editor can quickly find that point. Simple example.

You shoot sports events, say soccer. You want to find all the places where a goal was scored. You could watch the tape and add a marker for future reference, say a highlights video for the clubs end of season party. That's a fair amount of work if you shoot a lot of matches of kids sports!

Thing is of course the camera op has already watched the match. He presses the Index Mark button when a significant event happens, if the editor can find all those points quickly you have a huge time / cost saving.

I've come up with one gludge to address this, a unit that inserts a 1 second tone pulse on the spare audio channel, at least it'd give a visual cue on the Vegas T/L. Given the number of cameras we can have rolling on a weekend I'm going to need a few of these and they're going to need batteries etc, etc. Seems a kind of daft workaround when the camera already has the facility built into it. We just need to find a way to make Vegas play nicely with Sony cameras.

Now maybe, just maybe with XDCAM EX native support in V9 all will be resolved. I guess I might be happy although we'd need to switch to shooting all events to XDCAM, not exactly a cheap solution and there's not a lot of money in shooting kiddy sports.

Bob.
TLF wrote on 4/29/2009, 6:15 AM
Way back when I was studying as an engineer (in the days of analogue, when there was a buzz about BSB and D-MAC) index marks were one the topics we looked at. Not in relation to cameras, but to video recorders - at the time it was possible to add index markers both during recording (press the record button) and [I think] during playback. It only worked on HiFi video.

What I[m about to say could be a load of hogwash, but this is how I remember it..

A subsonic tone was recorded in the hifi track, and it was this tone that the playback deck would recognise when searching for index marks. Of course, once you'd entered an index mark it couldn't be deleted because that would delete not only the HiFi audio but also the video.

I don't know how the index marks are recorded on modern DV decks, but a subsonic tone seems likely.
farss wrote on 4/29/2009, 7:23 PM
Funny you should mention subsonic tones, I used to work for Muzak and the reel to reel decks used a 25Hz tone recorded on the tape to control program switching.

The index marks in modern DV are digital, probably as an addon to the timecode data, the bigger VCRs can shuttle to an index mark. It probably only works in DVCAM. I should also mention that there's DV and DVCAM tapes that have a memory chip in them for storing other data as well. This is rarely used as the memory chip adds a lot to the cost of the cassette.

Bob.
PeterWright wrote on 4/30/2009, 12:01 AM
Very good question Bob - I hope you're right about V9 being able to find these - it seems ridiculous to have such a useful feature only accessible in the camera.

Doug Jensen, in his EX1 field guide book says the intention is to be able to locate them while editing, but goes on to say, "However, I have yet to find a practical workflow for Shot Marks that couldn't be handled better some other way, therefore that's all that this book is going to cover about Shot Marks."
I believe he uses FCP.