Tip: Poor man's timecode

farss wrote on 11/28/2013, 2:07 AM
I've been tearing my hair out all day trying to find an easy way to solve a problem and I just found a quite remarkably simple solution that I think is worth sharing.

The scenario:
We shot a concert with three cameras:

EX1 with TC set to Time Of Day.
NEX 30 just left in record for the wide shot.
HC9 as a roving camera getting random close ups. As we were short of tape it wasn't left to record continuously so there's over 30 clips per tape.

Master audio was recorded to Edirol R4 which also does ToD (sort of).

The problem:
Syncing all the clips from the HC9.
It was set to Record Run TC...useless. As the singing wasn't in English and the lyrics repeat a LOT this was massively time consuming tedious and error prone task :(

The Solution:
Before jumping off a cliff I thought hm, pretty certain the camera does record time of day to tape. I wonder if somehow that gets preserved during capture and Vegas will tell me what time of day the camera went into record. A right click on the clip, select Properties and on the General tab under "Capture > Record" there it was.

Now it's a piece of cake. Sync first clip, make note of the ToD when record started and set T/L Ruler to match. Check time for next clip and drop it onto the T/L at that time. Repeat for every clip.

This is not exact, there'll be a second or two random error but that's a doodle to live with by slipping the clip and using the audio to find sync.

Bob.

Comments

willqen wrote on 11/28/2013, 2:35 AM
Hah, now that's my kind of sync ...

Will
set wrote on 11/28/2013, 3:45 AM
Before having PluralEyes, that's my way of make a sync too.

After the sync is complete, I usually save the first file and keep it, for backup purposes.

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corug7 wrote on 11/28/2013, 9:37 AM
Bob, how do you like using the NEX-VG30? I have been considering it for a B-camera.
farss wrote on 11/28/2013, 1:46 PM
[I]"Bob, how do you like using the NEX-VG30?"[/I]

Sorry, the camera I was using is the HXR NX30P which is a different beast entirely.

Bob.