Tascam 48 SMPTE lockup accessories.... Final Cut Pro... ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter lo.fi.love
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lo.fi.love

lo.fi.love

Functionally obsessed.
Hey folks,

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas!

I know that this is well-covered territory, but I'm having a difficult time searching for the information that I need.

I have a Tascam 48-OB, which has and accessory port for attaching a SMPTE device to do timecode lockup. Let's say that I wanted to do film scores on my 48: which devices would I need to make this possible?

And, I'm curious to know how one would achieve audio/video sync with Final Cut Pro on a Mac, using the 48 as the audio source. Has anyone done this?

I will hopefully find an experimental video/film artist in the next year for collaborations... I'm really excited to learn about all of this!

Thanks in advance... I've been very busy at home in the past few months and I'm looking forward to coming back and contributing more soon :)

Cheers,
Jeff
 
Dude, it's about time you posted something. I thought you dropped off the planet. Hope your Christmas was good. BTW the the tape is awesome.
 
dodgeaspen said:
Dude, it's about time you posted something. I thought you dropped off the planet. Hope your Christmas was good. BTW the the tape is awesome.
Click to expand...

Hey dodge! I didn't drop off the planet... instead, I holed up in my cave with about 600 RCA connectors and soldered about fifty-five miles of cables! Up next is repair and restoration of 4 of my 5 tape decks... hopefully that won't take quite as long.

Hope your Christmas was good, too. I'm glad you like RMGI tape so much!

Cheers,
Jeff
 
Probably the biggest question is whether you want to operate the 48 as the slave or the master in the sync relationship...
 
sweetbeats said:
Probably the biggest question is whether you want to operate the 48 as the slave or the master in the sync relationship...
Click to expand...

Is it possible to have either one or the other be the slave? I'm not averse to buying extra hardware if it is necessary.
 
Absolutely.

I'm gonna catch flak for this but slaving the analog deck is the "professional" option IMO...if you slave the deck then you are clocking the capstan to the digital clock of your DAW system...other way 'round and your are clocking your DAW to the capstan.

It is much more complicated and expensive to slave the deck...and some will argue that there is more wear and tear on the machine due to the transport rocking as it zeros in on lock, but I still maintain that it is a more proper way if you can afford the hardware and the patience to make it happen. I also readily point many to go the easy route and make the deck the master depending on financial and technical resources of the user...I realize my preference is mine and may not be right for everybody, but for me slaving the deck is the proper option...samples will inevitably have to be dropped and added to accomodate the mechanical anomalies of the capstan motor if you clave the DAW.

So pick your poison (more complicated and expensive up front, or try to ignore that fact that your music is being snipped and extended to keep step), and then we can move ahead.
 
If FCP has any provision for external sync at all, it will have been designed to lock the deck as a slave. Traditionaly, audio is always synced to video, because a VTR has to have the headwheel in absolute sync with the videotape or the picture will break up. Hence, everything has to be locked against the VTR, not vice-versa.

For a digital video editor, it might not even be possible since AFAIK the video is usually batch-processed and spat out as some kind of MPEG file.

Or do you mean that you want to be able to see the scene running in FCP while you're laying down the music? That I can understand.
 
jpmorris said:
Or do you mean that you want to be able to see the scene running in FCP while you're laying down the music? That I can understand.
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That's the idea.

Just came back to look at this thread because I'm probably going to do some film scoring in the next 3-6 months.
 
If you want to use the deck as master I recommend looking for a Midiman BiPort 2x4s on eBay. I picked mine up for only $15. Just got it recently but found out that the MIDI interface that connects via serial is not compatible with XP/vista/7 even if you have a serial port. :( But what's important is that it can be used standalone to R/W SMPTE at "24, 25, 30 and DF"? frame rates. I have it working with ProTools at 30fps and it works great!
 
I picked up a Tascam Midiizer on eBay for $150 so I've got the option now to slave the 48. I just hope hope hope that it comes with the cable... I don't want to have to make one myself :(
 
Building the cable shouldn't be that complicated if you have the wiring scheme figuraed out, but finding the correct socket for the synchronizer might become a problem. I bought a micro lynx via ebay for EUR 125,- to synchronize the DAW with my deck. The ELCO 38 pin connector for the deck is easy to find, suitable cable isn't a problem either but the micro lynx needs a 40 pin socket just like ATAPI harddrives. I didn't find any crimpable or solderable sockets at all. No hood for those sockets either. I hope your Midiizer has a more "common" connector like Sub-D 25 or something. That would be much more desirable. Let's just hope the cable is included because it's Tascam gear for Tascam decks ;)

Cheers
Tim
 
I don't want to contradict what sweetbeats said earlier, because he's absolutely right - the tape machine is not as stable as a digital wordclock, and in practice it would be better to have the tape machine slave.

But, I will say this: if you're recording a soundtrack, I don't think you're going to lose any quality on the digital side of things by the computer be the slave. I base this on the fact that you're scoring the audio on the tape machine, as the video is already and completed. It's not like you'll be bouncing tracks to and from the computer and tape machine.

The advantage to working this way will be you won't have to wait for the tape machine to sync up to the computer, which can be a real pain. To accomplish this, you have everything you need with the Midiizer already - it just requires a MIDI cable and an RCA cable from track 8 on the 48 into the Midiizer. When you turn on the Midiizer, you just select Others then MIDI Time Code in order to convert the SMPTE to MTC. You'll have to do this every time you start up the Midiizer.

When it would be helpful to have the tape deck slave to the computer is when it's time to mixdown to 2 track stereo (or however you're mixing the audio). I assume this is going to be going back into the computer for the director or whomever to balance your mixes with the dialog and incidental sounds and whatnot. For this you would need one of the Accessory 2 cables. I don't know much about the 48 - do you need an IF/1000 Parallel Unit to work alongside the Midiizer? Or, can you plug the Accessory 2 cable right into the 48, just as you would with a TSR, the MSR's, or a 238?

One thing that might help you with syncing is recording the audio from the movie onto one track of your tape machine. Of course, doing this would limit you to 6 tracks of analog audio with which to record.

I started to score a horror film once using Cool Edit Pro for video and sync and a Tascam MSR-16. The MSR was slaving to the computer. It was a major pain in the ass because of the length of time it would take for the MSR to sync and the tone changes it would occasionally make at the beginnings of some of the recordings due to the sync; the tape machine would report that it was in "sync," when in reality it really needed an extra second or three in order to even out the timing of playback. With a heavy heart, I ended up abandoning the use of the MSR, because the project needed to be done quickly, and I recorded it within Cool Edit Pro -- which still had its own sync issues with the video playback! If I were to do it again, I'd have done it as I described above: run the tape machine as master during tracking, then have it slave on mixdown. At the time, I was very new to synchronization and hadn't discovered N-Track, which in my opinion syncs much more fluidly than Cool Edit, and still gives the option of video playback. In Cool Edit (or at least the version I had) you had to alert the program before each and every time you planned to have the computer slave.

Good luck!
-MD
 
MD,

how much time did you give your deck to synchronize? The micro lynx manual advises to print the timecode beginning 15 to 30 seconds before 00:00:00:00 or even earlier to allow for the recorders to sync. I have no experience on any of this, just reading the manual...

I thought about this "evening out", since it also changes the pitch. I don't know how sophisticated DAW systems are today in regard to being used as a slave but theoretically it should be possible to just internally "record" the timecode along with the audio and take care of resampling at the end of the recording. The DAW would still basically run on its internal clock and compare its own timecode to the recorded timecode. That way you could preserve pitch and forget all latency issues. At least that's how I'd design it, were I a DAW software designer ;) Maybe I'm just thinking too simple.

Cheers
Tim
 
It would sync, but the issue of random access is wherein lies the problem.

If I were watching the movie and were able to perform everything in one-pass, one-take everything would have been fine in terms of sync. The issues begin when you're trying to do overdubs or record at a specific point in the film. Let's say a scene begins at 2:00 into the film. If the tape deck is slaving, you hit play on the computer, then stop. The tape deck will slave to the last point you just played on the computer. How long this takes will vary based on where the reel was previously cued. Once it gets there, you can hit play again on the computer. The tape machine will start playing once it receives this information, or will pause for a second or two until the master catches up to where the tape machine was last set. Once it begins playback on the tape machine, it will take another second or two in order to match the correct speed of the computer's playback.

So, for recording at 2:00 into the film, you'll probably really want to start playback at 1:45 or even 1:30 to ensure a solid sync. This doesn't sound like a big deal (and I was aware of this possibility before even attempting it) but it gets to be arduous in a short amount of time. For me, since I was improvising a lot of the material as I watched the film, I found it was stifling my creativity due to the amount of time it would take to get into sync. Instead of being able to work on an idea, make a mistake, and go back to the same spot in a second or two, it would take a minimum of 30 seconds to get back to the same point of reference in the movie to begin my performances. Add to this that everything that I was performing was on keyboard, and I'm a terrible keyboard player!

As I said, I ended up recording everything in Cool Edit, but it was just a few keyboard lines and overdubs here and there. The director of the movie gave a me a bottle of Jack afterwards that I think he stole from his old man.

In regards to resampling after the fact, I don't know enough about how these DAW's run to know for sure whether that's even a possibility or not. In theory it sounds like a good idea!

-MD
 
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