Fast Fuel and the Tao L-Port
an article by Jim MacAllister

In the January issue of Videography magazine, George Avgerakis’ "Planetary Producer" article writing about doing international production as a one man band praised the Canon XL1. In the March issue letters to the editor, Dave Burkley asked a number of questions of George. One which George did not address in his reply was this one:

Can you tell me how the XL1 performs when dumping video to the hard drive with the digital cable? I have heard you can control the XL1 with a card for your computer, but I wonder how the camera handles the jog and shuttle of editing.

I can’t speak to how the XL1 performs using the firewire port, but I now have many hours of experience controlling the XL1 via its LANC port and digitizing its Y/C output to the hard drives of my Newtek Flyer NLE. I’m doing this with a software package for the Amiga called Fast Fuel and a RS232-LANC cable by Image Architects for less than $200. Of premier importance to me was getting the DV time code into the Flyer. Time code is available on the LANC connection and digitizing using Fast Fuel provides the option of writing this time code to the beginning of each Flyer clip.

Another interface providing machine control of the XL1 is the L-Port 422 by Tao Media Systems. This black box lists for $495 and provides an interface between the RS-422 port on an NLE system, such as an AVID. In addition to machine control, the L-Port 422 also provides Time Code from the DV cassette to the NLE. Several post-production companies in Boston have made successful use of this device to interface low-cost DV and Hi-8 camcorders and decks into ther AVIDs.

I have just completed the editing a 45-minute talk show shot with two Panasonic EZ-1 cameras. Since there is no way to jam the DV code on these cameras, synchronization was going to be done by ear, but thanks to Murphy’s Law, one of the two cameras recorded with no sound.

Fortunately, the cameras were only stopped and started four times during the shoot, I’m good at reading lips, and the combination of the XL1 (as a playback deck) and Fast Fuel provided frame accurate clips. Once I had done my time code math and calculated the offset between the code on the two tapes, I could input the time code from the tape with sound, trim by the offset (a constant) and digitize the matching clip from the other tape, inserting it with perfect lip sync. Each time the cameras cut tape and restarted, I synced the tapes by eye and recomputed the offset.

The LANC cable and Fast Fuel provide machine control from the Amiga’s keyboard that takes advantage of all the XLl’s shuttle speeds, and variable speeds forward or reverse for goto and cueing functions. Edit points can be set in/out, marked on the fly and trimmed. Fast Fuel replaces the Record function of the Flyer. Fast Fuel can create files for batch digitizing and the amount of pad at the head and tail of clips can be customized. Fast Fuel replaces the Record function of the Flyer with its messages and edit points and durations appearing at the top of the Flyer screen.

After many days of using the XL1 as a feeder machine, I have had very few problems. All were intermittent aborts of digitizing which disappeared when the digitizing commands were repeated. I chalked most of them up to the fact that the machine control file I was using was designed for the Sony VX-1000. Aaron Ruscetta, the designer of Fast Fuel, didn’t have a machine control file specifically designed and tested with the XL1 yet. Most surprising to me was the frame accuracy of the DV time code on the Flyer clips, the very reasonable and reliable cueing of the tapes, and the complete absence of any video or audio dropouts over more than 100 hours of digitizing using twenty 60-minute DV tapes, including Sony, Maxell, and Panasonic brands. This was particularly surprising because I did more than a little shuttling of these tapes and fully expected them to show some of the problems, like creases and dropouts, that I had seen when editing Hi-8 tapes.

While I can’t answer Dave Burkley’s question about the digital cable specifically, it should follow that the XL1 will perform equally well when being controlled and digitizing via the firewire port. And for those out there lucky enough to be editing in the DV codec with newer NLE systems, the image quality will be that much better and multiple generations transparent.

The Watchdog notes: Jim MacAllister has been a visual artist making videos in Boston for over 25 years. He thinks the Canon XL1 is great in spite of its faults. His work includes award-winning corporate and medical videos and nationally seen documentaries. He is a born-again pagan, lives life passionately and wonders what will happen next.

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