Good DSLR syncing, and on a budget.
2010/01/21 14:35
The Canon 5D / 7D are hip, and get more and more use in the video industry. But the sound input sucks, so people use dual system audio. Good news for me, I get to sell more of my FCP Aux TC readers. But I foresee some serious problems in the near future. To get timecode into the camera, you've got just a mini-jack, unbalanced and I'm pretty sure you'll break the input jack within a few days in the field.
How to sync them then?
Of course you can compare the audio tracks. But that only works if the cam has decent sound, it won't work when your 'real' mic is at a significant distance of your cam. An old style clapperboard will of course work always. But then you still have to line up each and every shot manually, and just pray that the shooters have their administration in order, or you're in for a long and tedious job.
So, my FCPauxTC reader is for the happy few that can afford it, and can modify the camera in a way the connectors won't break. But how about the rest?
I've thought it over and think I came up with a very simple solution. Canon cams save metadata, just as the BWF recorder. So if you get the camera's internal time locked to the BWF recorders time, you should be home free. And that is doable, as I will explain later on.
But what if you don't have a BWF recorder?
Well, if you record to any device other than tape, you end up with a file. Files have a creation date and time. So, you have a match that cannot go wrong.
How to make all this work:
The most important part, you need to have a common clock. Now since you're shooting on small SD cards, you'll probably bring a laptop to the shoot to offload your material. And a laptop makes a perfect common clock. You can sync the camera's time to the laptop time. If you use the same laptop for recording the sound (do use of course a decent audio input device!), you've got all the metadata you need!
But how to sync the external BWF recorder? For that I'm making something.
It'll give you two options:
1) make the BWF recorder master, and slave the laptop's time to that
2) Output the laptop's current time as Timecode so you can slave the BWF recorder
So, either set the time on the camera and on the BWF recorder, or set the laptop to the BWF recorders's time, then sync the camera to that.
But what about post?
You end up with files that have metadata, how to line them up? More on that in my next entry, first I'll have to make the syncing application, since that is the heart of the whole idea. I'll promise it will be out very soon.
Back to the blog listing
2010/01/21 14:35
The Canon 5D / 7D are hip, and get more and more use in the video industry. But the sound input sucks, so people use dual system audio. Good news for me, I get to sell more of my FCP Aux TC readers. But I foresee some serious problems in the near future. To get timecode into the camera, you've got just a mini-jack, unbalanced and I'm pretty sure you'll break the input jack within a few days in the field.
How to sync them then?
Of course you can compare the audio tracks. But that only works if the cam has decent sound, it won't work when your 'real' mic is at a significant distance of your cam. An old style clapperboard will of course work always. But then you still have to line up each and every shot manually, and just pray that the shooters have their administration in order, or you're in for a long and tedious job.
So, my FCPauxTC reader is for the happy few that can afford it, and can modify the camera in a way the connectors won't break. But how about the rest?
I've thought it over and think I came up with a very simple solution. Canon cams save metadata, just as the BWF recorder. So if you get the camera's internal time locked to the BWF recorders time, you should be home free. And that is doable, as I will explain later on.
But what if you don't have a BWF recorder?
Well, if you record to any device other than tape, you end up with a file. Files have a creation date and time. So, you have a match that cannot go wrong.
How to make all this work:
The most important part, you need to have a common clock. Now since you're shooting on small SD cards, you'll probably bring a laptop to the shoot to offload your material. And a laptop makes a perfect common clock. You can sync the camera's time to the laptop time. If you use the same laptop for recording the sound (do use of course a decent audio input device!), you've got all the metadata you need!
But how to sync the external BWF recorder? For that I'm making something.
It'll give you two options:
1) make the BWF recorder master, and slave the laptop's time to that
2) Output the laptop's current time as Timecode so you can slave the BWF recorder
So, either set the time on the camera and on the BWF recorder, or set the laptop to the BWF recorders's time, then sync the camera to that.
But what about post?
You end up with files that have metadata, how to line them up? More on that in my next entry, first I'll have to make the syncing application, since that is the heart of the whole idea. I'll promise it will be out very soon.
Back to the blog listing