Virtual Production with BMPCC - Timecode and Genlock*

today was a big day why because i got my black magic pocket cinema camera 4k into unreal with time code and with gen lock i am going to show you exactly what i did in case you want to do this why is that important to me uh well i have a black magic pocket cinema camera and when i look online i see a lot of recommendations on very expensive stuff at least for an indie production like i'm at the indie stage i'm just experimenting with virtual production at home in a space that i've kind of cordoned off with a green screen and a vive motion tracker and i'm trying to see how much i can get from that when you look online you see a lot of talk you see a lot of talk about two things in particular one of them is gen lock and one of them is time code gen lock comes up a lot and when you look online uh or you read uh discussions people talk about having gen locked cameras and having a reference input and those cameras are maybe six thousand dollars at the right time sure that would be a great idea but i just wanted to see if i could get this camera like into unreal uh and through the compositor so a few notes one i'm not using end display and display is where i think gen lock really comes into being important because you have to synchronize the shutter of your camera with unreal and the end display uh the in display render machines so i'm not doing that i'm using a green screen i'm just rendering things out in the compositor and i'm even recording things in take recorder so i could actually go back after the fact and re-render out the scenes if i want to but i just want to explain how i actually got all this working because you might be interested and who knows what you're up to so i made these slides and i'm going to share the link to this slide deck in the video so you can just look at it and see exactly how i created this but the first step is you need these four elements so you need the black magic camera which i've got right here you know lens of your choice the other thing you're going to need is this deck link pro now i got the ak pro because it was i think it was like 150 more dollars from up from this uh from the 1080p version uh so this comes with four inputs four ak uh i guess 8k inputs it's 12g 12g sdi is really what you need to know now this is perfect if you hook this up to a professional camera great you get your time code you can gen lock on this reference input do whatever you want but this doesn't have sdi out however it does output time code and but it's in it it's over hdmi now i've tried to look into exactly what the specification is for this i think what's happening is uh they embed the time code in an hdmi audio channel so that's uh ltc like the linear time code format now this is the piece of magic that kind of tied it all together here's the box this is the micro converter hdmi to 3g 3g sdi and this goes from the blackmagic to the deck link i've got a diagram of it here and uh so you need one hdmi cable and one sdi cable and then that in terms of equipment that's it it's it's going now there's an important note and i left it at the end of the slides um i got this from b h and i put a i put a link there apparently there are some versions of this that don't actually uh transcode the time code or whatever you call it and i i looked at some on amazon that didn't appear to do it so everything else looked identical though so you have to make sure you get the one that says it does time code and it even says time code on the box right there or here let me oh you believe me but here time code right there um and then a couple other things worth mentioning is you might want to like see what camera settings i have so i i'm just recording on black magic raw uh 4k like the high like the highest res the highest format or whatever um and then here 24 frames per second in film log uh and then over here on the monitor so the hdmi i i ticked clean feed because the uh you want a clean feed coming out of here because that's what's going into unreal um and then uh i i didn't yeah so you want to clean feet because that's what's going into unreal then let's see what else do i have uh [Music] oh i turned off time code drop frame uh image stabilization is off i think you want image stabilization off for the motion sensor and then you know those are the main bits if you're interested in purchasing exactly what i got it's right there it's no affiliate links i don't have any of that so you can just click on it but i would only advise caution on this uh the micro converter and i'm not saying that's the only place you can get it i'm just saying i know that one works so let's i'm going to hook this camera up and i have my my my uh my equipment right over there so i'm going to go hook it up and then i'm going to open unreal and take you through exactly what to do so i've got the camera running exactly as it shows in this diagram and i've got the settings set up in the same way that they are in uh the panels on the left here so we're gonna open a new unreal and if you haven't seen any other videos i always like to start with at from scratch unreal because i find that when i watch other people's videos there's often times where they might have made an assumption about how they're setting something up and i just missed it i don't know why and that can burn a lot of hours i kind of like going through things slower i don't i don't really rush anything and you know sometimes i still make mistakes so i always do uh going back so i always do a blank film project because this actually has a few plugins that are already enabled which is nice um and then let's call this time code blackmagic pocket cinema camera i hope this works you know i get this error sometimes and it actually like if i just re-run it a couple times all right so we have unreal booting i'm going to close this and you might look over here and see default time code provider and if you if you are like oh i don't see those panels on mine they're just under window developer tools and i turned on um time code provider and this last one here gen lock i turned those both on and i docked them to the corner so these are both uh should get should be working by the end of it uh so this says the time code provider provided by unreal so even though this is showing time code it doesn't match what's coming out of the camera so one thing i've started doing uh just in this demo is i invert the blackmagic time code by 12 hours so that it's it you can tell whether you're getting the unreal one or the black magic one the black magic one will just say five am okay so what do we need to do a little clean up and then uh first thing let's just get the black magic let's like see if we can get the video in so i like to go to media and media bundle media bundle blackmagic pocket cinema camera it just kind of handles it i don't know what it's doing uh but under media source i'm going to click blackmagic media source now you couldn't click this unless you had like one of the supported deck link cards in the past i was using a stream media source or something like that or even file but this is nice so you can open it up and you have to configure a few things remember there's four i o ports on here so you just have to say which one and this is important and if you're even off by a little bit nothing shows up so this is a good place to debug if you think something's wrong this has to match everything exactly so as you saw i'm at um okay i know in the camera i was using 4k dci progressive at 24 frames per second here's the big limitation of the pocket cinema camera it only outputs 1080p uh over the hdmi cable so um you know that will be okay because i intend to record in the camera record in unreal and then match it all up later and i'm still gonna benefit from time code in gen lock um if you were live compositing and live recording everything and you wanted to do it at 4k where you get the composited like output image and you save that and send it straight to the editor then you probably need to invest in a more expensive camera all right apply and then so this is the first trick i didn't need to set anything here because it's another spot that i actually set the time code so i'm just going to leave this time code 1 as blank any other things worth noting so this would be if unreal is generating the time code and the blackmagic is listening for it but that's not what's happening the blackmagic's internal clock is our master clock and we're synchronizing unreal to that master clock i think everything else is okay um you know if you're the this is the lens warping which you would probably want to look at if you were uh if you were you know doing like that's another thing to look at all right so let's just drag it on to our scene and this should be us let me uh scale it up i'm so bad at clicking these things all right there we are so i would say the latency is really good i think i measured it at two frames so i recorded the the time code coming in here and the time code coming off the camera like in the same shot that was two frames off so for this it's very is very quick all right um but this isn't the time code of the camera so the video is here the time code is not here let's do that next so if you were to go to project settings and type time code you would see this time code provider none and you might think i'll pick blackmagic here's the problem you click it and it's just using like the built-in blackmagic class like nothing got created here so i don't have a chance to configure it what you can do or what you need to do then i'm going to leave that it won't it will yeah it's going to give me an error and if you look at the logs it's like i don't know what to do with this we need to create a blueprint so instead of any of these we're going to go black magic custom time provider there's two black magic classes here and we're going to use both of them but the first one is the time code provider so blackmagic custom time code provider it should be blackmagic pocket cinema camera custom timecode provider all right all you need is this stuff in the corner and uh where are you reading timecode from i'm reading it from the the same input as my video same settings and the time code format is this vitc format so uh if it's coming in over sdi i think it's going to be this vitc and then i'm going to take off use gen lock to count now there will be an opportunity to turn that on again later but if we leave it on actually let's look at the default i'll reinitialize the time code nothing works uh oh because i haven't yet set that as my my timecode provider i've made this mistake make sure you don't make it there it is blackmagic custom timecode provider and okay bets yes or no will it be working i say yes there we go um maybe this doesn't matter all right well i'll just leave it so you can see here it's got blackmagic custom timecode provider as like the source here's the timecode and notice that it's now saying 5am which is what i set the blackmagic camera to so that is in fact pulling the timecode from the blackmagic now and if i were to go to take recorder you can see that any takes that i record and render out with this will have the correct time code i'll probably do that in another video but let's for this one also see we can get gen lock working now a point of clarity gen lock is this like very specific thing uh about like tri-band black pulses or something like that often use like another term i've seen is like a reference input some places put time code and gen lock together it gets complicated i had no idea like i was so lost as to what what my camera could do what unreal can do what i needed to do um but i want to clarify so in unreal it's not really gen lock it's actually something else it's called time step custom time step and this is what we're going to customize as well so the custom time step is just saying when unreal should run to the next frame and what you really want is unreal to render a frame exactly when you have a frame from the camera so if i go to here and i go new blueprint again black magic custom time step so instead of using the provider now i'm subclassing this other one black black magic pocket cinema camera custom time step there's no like bad acronyms in there right okay and uh also you just go into here it's the same it's the same trick three times in a row that's it well almost i have to set that as the custom time step boom so there you have it uh time code and gen lock or custom time step using blackmagic pocket cinema camera uh the decklink pro and the micro converter i hope this is useful to everyone else uh hopefully in the future i'm going to do an example with using this in the compositor i just didn't have time to set up my green screen today uh and then i want to actually like get things into take recorder into the sequencer and then render out with movie render queue pull it all together again at the very end hopefully yeah i'll share the process with you along the way hope this was valuable

Channel: Jake G. Water

Views: 23,474

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Id: cPt5EeUwwXc

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021