Canon XL1 Nightmare - solutions and observations

[Richard Brown]

Hello all... again...

It's definitely an odd thing to have a producer/director with 3 years, 
3 months of his life apparently going up in smoke as he perceives his 
footage as totally unusable in the edit bay...

Then, the thinking cap... and solutions.

As it turns out, the XL1, which is a bit alien in our totally Sony 
universe here, is quirky... to say the very, very least.

As to playback, you have to go to a third party who 1) tries harder, 
and 2) knows no pro deck plays back XL1 tapes reliably. The solution: 
the JVC BR-DV600UA, which features a very wide (appropriately 
forgiving) playback head. Every single tape, from the XL1 and XL1s used 
on the production which came in, now playback without any error, unless 
you would consider 45+ hours of feature footage without a single slate 
an error.

Our problem was our use of Sony and its adherence to (or Sony's flavor 
of) the DV spec, something Canon "only sorta" does. No Sony pro DV deck 
could read the so called  "bad XL1 tapes" which we have by the dozen in 
this show. As the Sony head only partially read the DV data from the 
XL1... well... there it is. This is NOT to say there aren't the one or 
two oddball XL1 tapes which every Sony DV deck could read. The problem 
is, such tapes are RARE, and speaks to well, nothing short of really 
sloppy head/transport design in the XL1. But imagine a 
producer/director SEEING those oddballs on a Sony deck against a 
wheelbarrow full of what SEEMED to be bad tapes. Thus the "nightmare."

The next problem is the XL1's just as famous non-synchronized audio. 
The XL1 uses a quasi-VBR (variable bit rate) audio codec, which starts 
at 48000 and varies upward. So far, the farthest afield the audio has 
gone in our digitizing is 48022.7, which creates, in one example we 
had, a potential of about 12 frames out of sync. Every tape is 
different, and reports of the "VBR" phenomenon seem verified, as the 
audio rate changes per clip. It's a total mess. This is why Final Cut 
has the "Sync Adjust Movies over 5 minutes" preference, which is not 
unlike the common act in audio of using SMPTE sync markers, pulling 
everything into the happy camp at regular intervals. I do wonder, 
however, how often that feature, when checked, actually does do the 
sync adjust. Even five minutes, in XL1 time, could be a sync problem, 
depending on the audio rate. In any event, Final Cut is doing a fine 
job keeping the dialog happy.

HOWEVER, the caveat is, you can't go home again. Once you have 
digitized an XL1 tape, you cannot, say, clone a copy from the timeline. 
If you do, bingo, way, way out of sync. In the Sony world, in DVCAM, 
you can do that trick all day, week, month, year, millennia long. It 
just stays in sync. The hassle was, we had not had anything XL1 
in-house until this show, and, well, imagine the egg dripping down 
faces when a clone suddenly shows all those frames out of sync, even 
after dropping a couple of grand for a shiny new deck.

And that brings up the next caveat: MiniDV itself, which is many things 
BUT a professional format. The JVC deck says "ProfessionalDV" right on 
the dust lid over the tape insert. What's "professional" about it are 
all the component, composite, SVideo, and Firewire I/O connections, 
true internal SMPTE time code, the acceptance of house sync, and such. 
The MiniDV format, though, does not include locked audio to picture. 
Ah, but there's always sync adjust. Just wish it could be on a 
clapper...

As to the audio problems I had mentioned in the "Nightmare" post, well, 
these remain and are very, painfully, real. All that needs to be said 
is 1) watch your levels 2) watch your impedance matching (!!!) 3) use 
GOOD headphones to monitor BOTH the mixer AND the camera audio, and 4) 
do field verification of audio and picture from the camera tapes during 
shooting. Even if an XL1 is tricked out to accept pro level field 
audio, there are several potential problem areas in the audio chain 
concerning the mics, the mixer, and the audio connection itself which 
are prone to variability - and far more critical when the destination 
is a camera not really purposed professionally. On our little show, 
these sorts of audio problems are going to triple the work in audio 
post, prayer-laden, hyper conservatively speaking, and require 
additional field audio production and boatloads of actors doing ADR of 
unscripted, ad-libbed material (ouch!) This show has comedy at its 
core, with comedians in many on-camera roles working in an around the 
script as written.

Lastly, about shooting an XL1 feature from the perspective of post:

1) NEVER SHOOT 16x9!!! While I would not wish to demean anyone, if 
using DV for a feature, you are likely not Steven Soderbergh or his 
crew, and thus you just MIGHT be needing a little bit of compositional 
help down the pike. When I took Steadicam class with Garrett Brown a 
long while back, he had just finished "The Shining," and piloted a 
wheelchair around the stage doing his "Danny" impression, complete with 
finger, but instead of "Redrum!" he said "Headroom!" Steadicam 
operators tend to chop heads, early on, and the same thing can happen 
shooting an XL1 in 16x9 mode. In our case, the camera operator, working 
a long day in low budget, got tired and on certain master shots on a 
tight set, obviously closed his shooting eye for a quick snooze with an 
unlocked tripod head. There goes the top of the head, sinking, sinking, 
and now, the eyes... settle... for a master shot of noses. Well, it IS 
a comedy, but I can't use the shot. The 16x9 option used on our little 
feature is forcing our hand editorially. We are occasionally going to 
have to cut for FRAMING rather than PERFORMANCE! Big OUCH, number 2!

What it comes down to:  if you want 16x9, shoot 4x3 and later take the 
EXACT slice of 16x9 you want for your widescreen show. Final Cut, for 
example, can keyframe track your 16x9 window to make you look like 
Vilmos Zsigmond and his crew... well, at least you will have slick, 
precise framing fully tweaked as needed in post.

2) NEVER SHOOT IN XL1 FRAME MODE! Basically, it makes everything soft, 
adds noise (grain), and denies the wonderful world of post production 
"film look" which will blow away anything the XL1 attempts internally. 
What's worse, it denies the ability to "cheat" the video with a touch 
of resizing (say, for getting that mic outa there), because the stuff 
is already soft, and thus cannot handle this sort of thing, as it would 
be unusable. What does XL1 frame mode look like to us? A lot like a 
PD150 at maximum gain, say, shooting with dinner table candles as key 
lights. About the same overall look. With maybe 50 effects shots 
needing to be produced in post, imagine the hassle of further having to 
match the effect to the look of XL1 frame mode and get it to blend. 
Think of your on-set camera tapes as pristine originals which must 
deliver 100% of the camera's image quality to post (so you can mess 
with it later.)

3) PLEASE use a well marked (Scene and Take) slate, INCLUDING clapping 
the clapper. That's right, even in video... Our film has no slates, 
sync issues, and 45+ hours of footage to, well, DE-CYPHER the best we 
can, adding a huge amount of uncreative, unnecessary maintenance time 
to the edit. A slate would have saved the day, and our (or your) sanity.

4) If you are going to pull all-nighters and do the low budget thing, 
learn about a) caffeine and b) L-Tyrosine (which, if you don't know, is 
your "second wind in a bottle." Take 3, trust me.