American Cinematographer - December 1984 - 101

RandKen organized the film
all elements were leadered and iden¬
tified per camera reports. A labeling
so

How to send your audience
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system was devised for the concert,
and film was categorized into various
boxes for easy identification. In addi¬

tion,

a count

sheet

was

made out that

determined the number of times each
camera started and stopped, and what
time was to be used at each sync point.
When asked what he would
do differently on a similar project in the

future, Ken Gladden had few sug¬
gestions. "Things worked pretty well.
It's

only natural that when you do some¬
thing for the first time, you learn a few
things, but generally, it was terrific."
There were minor difficulties,
however. One transfer problem he en¬
countered was with the prerolls. "The
first thing you ask yourself is, 'how do I

Both the Rank and
quite a distance to
get up to speed, so it took a while
before we could get an edit going. That
was a function of the computer's soft¬
ware, and I'd modify that a bit for the

sync this mess up?'
the sound had to go

time. As it was, it only took 15
seconds for each sync point, and we
were able to transfer 15 or 20 tenminute rolls in a good session."

next

According to Randy Gladden,
key to this synchronization system
was remembering that the reference cy¬
cle for a film's sync pulse is rated at
60, while the sync pulse of videotape is
59.94 per second. "A common mistake
is to assume that because you're shoot¬
ing film, you should film at 59.94. You
end up with the sound on videotape and
the picture on film, but they don't go
together. Then, you've got to change
the variable speed to get those back
into sync, which is an expensive, timeconsuming process, and not 100% accu¬

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though it's rated 59.94, so
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videotape."
Another

thing to remember
was that the film cameras running at 24
frames per second were shooting time
code off video monitors running at
30fps. Sometimes the same number
was picked up several times on film.
To eliminate this problem,
Ken Gladden figured out a mathematical
formula in advance that converted film
frame code into video frame code. "To

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American Cinematographer - December 1984

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