This may be a little off the topic you intended but....I love to watchg the "extra features" on movie DVDs - especially those that illustrate the "behind the scenes" activity of those who make large-scale, professional movies. I have noticed scenes showing people at work editing using screens that always have a time code running along the bottom of the monitor.

I know that there is one standard time code called SMPTE. (And I believe that it was "The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers" themselves that originated that time code.) There are many other time code formats out there too. (Search for "time codes" on google.com.)

Whether or not any of this would be applicable to our level of work is beyond me. I was looking into it recently because I believe that time codes would somehow allow me to lock the sound in with the video. My camera doesn't have any external microphone input so I have been casting around for ways to add better sound than simply using the awful internal microphone.

TASCAM makes a small digital recorder that would be perfect. It even has four microphone inputs and a tiny mixing board all in a box the size of a standard cassette recorder. But it's being digital doesn't necessarily mean that the playback will remain in sync with the video! They would be two totally separate machines used during filming and I don't doubt but that I would need to continually make adjustments throughout the film to keep things in sync! Unless there was some small device that would somehow keep them locked together in time.