setting video start time to smpte question

Please forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I can’t find anything about it.

We always write to a video track which has a 2 second “2-pop” for reference at the beginning. In Logic you can set the video start to 59:58:00 and the audio at 1:00:00:00, so the video starts exactly 2 seconds after the audio, no matter what the tempo is.

In Nuendo I can “set timecode at cursor” to 59:58:00 at then drag the movie start to that spot, then start the audio at 00:00:00:00, and that works - as long as I don’t change the tempo. If I change the tempo the audio moves to a different start point on the smpte line. Is there a way to lock both the video and audio to smpte start positions? If not, that seems like a major omission in a program like this.

The workaround for us has been to set a tempo track that starts at 120 BPM for exactly one 4/4 measure (ie one measure = 4 beats = 2 seconds exactly), then change to the tempo we need. But this is not really a good solution, since any pre-roll with click will have the wrong tempo, which makes it hard to start playing on the downbeat.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

As long as your audiotracks are set up “time-based”, there should not be any problem caused by tempo-track.
(If there is a orange quarter-note shown on the tracks, click it)

If I have any tempo changes within the track, would that still work?

And it’s difficult to write music to linear time rather than bars and beats. Even though I’m composing to picture, these are short pieces (usually 30 second spots), so there are few “cues” to hit.