Burning time code onto DVDs

[Bill Parker]

I shot a job a couple of weeks ago where I delivered to the client a DVD with time code burned in for them to log. I used the camera and played back the clips into a DVD recorder through composite out. The problem is that I had a few hours of interviews spread out over five cards' worth of footage. I had off-loaded the cards during the shoot (I had three cards) and dumped the footage onto an external drive. When I went to record the footage onto the DVD, I had to transfer the footage back onto the cards from the external drive and then play them back from the camera to the DVD recorder - a tedious process that ate up a large chunk of a day.

Can anyone think of a better process to get a DVD to a client w/ time code? If I did it using FCP, I would need to convert all the footage to mov files and then lay all the footage onto a timeline, burn in the time code (which I believe would then have to be rendered), and then compress the whole thing - even more tedious! Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Craig Seeman]

I use and prefer the FCP route with the Time Code reader filter.

On my Octo Intel Mac, importing clips from the hard drive slightly over 7x real time. Import All, easy. I'd need to do this for the edit anyway. Select all the clips in TC order and drop in on the time line. Drop TC reader and one clips to tweak settings. Copy. Select all clips. Paste. Then I render.

I'm going to be importing for edit and that's very fast anyway. Applying the TC filter to all clips in a timeline takes a few seconds. While rendering I can do other non FCP stuff on the same computer. Then I burn the results in iDVD. iDVD might not be the prettiest but it's simple.

My fantasy workflow would be to string all the clips together in a compression app that can apply a TC burnin filter. Telestream/Episode has a TC burnin filter but can't handle the source files until converted to MOV and can't string them together.

[Bill Parker]

That looks like a good method. If I am in a situation where I will be bringing in all my clips, I'll do it that way. Right now, I'll only be using a fraction of what I shoot. Thanks.

[Craig Seeman]

But you described your process as eating up the better part of the day.

You can simply dump your select into the FCP timeline, render TC burnin and off it goes to disk. That still sounds faster than dumping back to the SxS. How can you even do selects otherwise you break the BPAV or you have to encode to HDV.

In fact if you have a real time DVD Video recorder, you wouldn't even have to render the TC burnin since, on most fast Macs, it'll play real time.

Originally Posted by Bill Parker

That looks like a good method. If I am in a situation where I will be bringing in all my clips, I'll do it that way. Right now, I'll only be using a fraction of what I shoot. Thanks.

[Bill Parker]

Dumb question - how do I record on the DVD recorder from the Mac? I have a Kona card - can I go component out to the recorder? I've never tried that. Actually, I only have composite in on the recorder. I just noticed a firewire in on the recorder. Let me play around with it and see what I can come up with. Thanks for your patience!