Put colorbars and tone on a tape

Easy version

Use the Web interface to route bars and tone to a deck by middle-clicking on the Sync Generator box and left-clicking on the relevant deck.
Put a tape in the deck.
Make sure the input select control on the deck is set to line.
Record 60 seconds of bars and tone at the beginning of your tape.

See also the Colorbars section of the Recording a movie file to tape from an SGI page for one possible quick and dirty way to do this along the way.

More detail

If you're bothering to put bars and tone on your tape, you probably want to black the tape first and then do an insert edit of bars and tone to retain the control track.

You might want to double-check that you're getting bars and tone on your tape:

To hear what's happening, you might need to turn up the following controls on the Audio Mixer: the Speaker Volume knob, Master Volume slider, and Rec Mon slider. See illustration.
Note that tone is an ear-splitting shriek, so don't turn the volume up too far!

To see what's happening, middle-click on the deck and left-click on one of the monitors.

The Telect commands to set this up for the VHS Record deck are:

telect -lntsc -ibars -ovhsrec
telect -laudio -itone -ovhsrec

(The last line is actually redundant, the bars alias includes both bars and tone. The tone alias, on the other hand, is only tone.)

Additional notes

Q: Why should I put bars and tone on my tape?

A: If you're sending in a tape to someone who's going to include it on a compilation, it's an extremely good idea to include 60 seconds of bars and tone at the beginning of your tape. Bars and tone make the life of the person who's doing the compilation about an order of magnitude easier. They can use them to calibrate both the video and the audio levels properly.

Troubleshooting

Return to Main Video Menu
videolab@graphics.stanford.edu
Last modified: Fri Nov 26 19:04:21 PST 1999