</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">Originally posted by eerie eric:
<strong>I'm using Adobe Premiere 6.0 and I'm getting a lot of skips and slight pauses when I print to video...should I have it set on non drop frame timecode? What's the difference anyway?</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">That wouldn't be the problem. I'd have to know your setup to really troubleshoot it. My off-the-cuff diagnosis with no other information is too slow a hard drive.
Is your OS or Premiere on the same hard drive as your media clips? That can bog down a drive that should otherwise be fast enough to work.
As far as drop frame timecode and non-drop frame timecode goes, this has absolutely no effect on your image whatsoever. It only effects the (drum roll please...) timecode. If you use non-drop frame timecode, the time elapsed on your timecode display will slowly drift out of sync with the time elapsed on your wall clock. This is because of the whole 29.97fps instead of 30fps thing.
It may help to think of it as 30 frames per 1.001001 seconds. 29.97fps is inherently misleading.
Since there are slightly less than 30 frames in a second of NTSC video, and timecode displays act as if there are exactly 30 frames in a second, after an hour, your timecode display reads 1 hour 3 seconds. This kind of thing sends A/V types into a tizzy, and the earth would have flown off its axis years ago if it wasn't for the timely invention of ('nother drum roll...) drop frame timecode.
Drop frame timcode, appropriately enough, drops a frame (on the timecode display only) every now and then, so that after an hour the timecode display says 1 hour. There is a specific formula (kinda like leap years) to figure out which frames to drop. I don't know what it is. It's important to note that drop frame isn't actually dropping a frame, its just dropping numbers out of its (otherwise linear) sequence.
So, Uncle subby?
Yes?
Why in the hell do we even have non-drop frame timecode?
Well, back in the day, commercials (and CG) were never over a couple of minutes long. Too short to throw the clocks off. We also didn't have PowerPCs in our toasters back then, so saving computer cycles by not having to calculate the drop frame made some sense. Nowadays its just pretty silly.
Ultimately, unless you have some lazy-ass client who wants it for some reason, there's no reason to ever go non-drop.
[edit for clarity]
<small>[ 07-19-2002, 10:39 PM: Message edited by: subego ]</small>
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