DV Capture/Editing - Timecode as subtitle?

[wlgspotter]

Hi:

I am trying to make some of my home videos into DVD. I have a Sony Digital8 handycam, with a firewire connection to my PC running XPSP1. I use Premiere 6.0 to capture/edit, TMpgEnc to encode and TMpgEnc DVD Author to author, and Nero to burn the DVD.

I know that there is a "timecode" kept in the original Digital8 tape, where the date/time of the original movie being recorded it kept. When I import/capture into Premiere, and do the editing in Premiere, and write back the resulting movie back into my handycam, the timecode is left untouched. I was wondering if it's al all possible to extract this tomecode out and input it as a subtitle for the DVD?

I know this sound far-fetched, but I was wondering if anyone knows can this be done at all?

Thanks.

[Gil T Pleasure]

When copying DV footage from camcorder to a firewire enabled DVD standalone recorder, the timecode is automatically kept as subtitles (at least for the Philips DVD+RW standalone recorders anyway) so it is possible. As for the "how to" part, that's a different question.

[wlgspotter]

Thanks Gil. Do you know if it's possible to do it via any PC/desktop applications, i.e. Adobe Premiere?

And if it's possible, can you show me how??.. Thanks.

[Gil T Pleasure]

Do I know how? Not really. I would suggest you check with Adobe's tech support to see if Premiere can do it. Sorry, I am not much of a help.


Edit:
You said that you "import/capture into Premiere, and do the editing in Premiere, and write back the resulting movie back into my handycam, the timecode is left untouched." Have you tried outputting the resulting movie to DVD? I'm curious if the timecode is kept as subtitle. Hmm....

[wlgspotter]

Hi Gil:

Thanks for your help anyway. It's been great.

And no, I've not actually tried outputting the resulting edited movie straight as a DVD. Firstly, I'm running Premiere 6.0, which does not come with built-in DVD authoring support. At best, I could export it as an MPEG2 movie stream (using 3rd party plug-ins), in which case I think the timecode will not be exported as a subtitle. The thing is I've not tried it myself so I don't really know for fure. I may actually try and see if I can do it, perhaps, with a 5-10 minute portion of the movie.

On another note, a friend of mine was actually thinking about the same thing and has actually emailed Adobe support to ask if they do support capturing/converting timecode as subtitle (even in Premiere 6.5), and Adobe has replied and said no. So, I guess at the moment the only way to do it was to use the standalone Philips DVD Recorder you mentioned .

Regards
Chuck

[HAGGARD]

wlgspotter,

There is a tool that can extract the date/time information from a DV-AVI file and exports it as text. This text can then be used in Authoring software (eg. DVD Maestro) to make a subtitle stream...
This proggy is called DVSubMaker and it can be downloaded at :

http://icqphone.ru/video2tv/

You also need a proggy to convert subtitle format so it can be imported to DVDMaestro. This proggy is called Subtitle Workshop and can be found here :

http://urusoft.cjb.net

I did test this software and it worked fine for me!!!

Good Luck

'HAG

[nonostante]

Hi all,
I've updated this post because I've got some question about the topic and the software listed in.
- I've tried the Dvsubmaker + Subtitle Workshop and they work very well but, what about if I am frame serving?
Dv Submaker doesn't recognize the "fake" avi generated, so it seems you need to produce the dv avi from the editing program before encoding, losing the advantages of frame serving. Is that right? Any solutions?

Any replies will be appreciated.
Bye

[HAGGARD]

Dv Submaker doesn't recognize the "fake" avi generated, so it seems you need to produce the dv avi from the editing program before encoding, losing the advantages of frame serving. Is that right? Any solutions?

nonostante,
Frameserving does not work in this case because it only 'serves' just one 'frame' to the program that processes it... So you're losing ALL information within the original AVI (eg. Date/Timecode, etc.)...
I Guess that it is possible to export the edited material to DV-AVI again and then let DVSubmaker create date/timecode over that piece...

'HAG

[nonostante]

Thanks 'Hag,
it was exactly what I thought and, yes, as I stated, it is possible (necessary, in this case) to first export the edited avi before encoding.
Thank you for your great explanation, I'm not keen on frame serving and hope there were some faster solution.

Non

[HAGGARD]

nonostante,

Because re-rendering to DV-AVI generates quality loss, it's maybe better to use the edited piece only for DVSubmaker to generate Date/Timecodes...
After generating Date/Timecode textfile with DVSubmaker, delete this AVI.
Then frameserve the edited piece again into your favorite encoder to circumvent this generation loss...
Then add video/audio/subs together with DVDMaestro...

It's a bit more work, but the quality of the video is much better this way...

'HAG