Look at the Excalibur helper for Vegas...extremely helpful, not only for syncing your clips, but also for setting up your camera sqitching *very* simply.

http://www.vegastrainingandtools.com

Depending on the length of the event, I would recommend NOT stopping the cameras once started. That way, you only have to worry about sync once. It would be a real pain to try to sync individual clips!

Andy

PS - Get Excalibur!

4 good tricks:

1- roll both tapes and have someone on both cameras flash a still camera flash. This will ease up the syncing part.

2- As the previous poster wrote: don't stop rolling on both cameras untill the event is done. You will only have to sync once.

3- Have your wide shot cameraman shoot AS IF HE IS ON AIR ALL THE TIME. This will give you protection while the second camera focuses and stabilises his cutaway shots.

4- For editing, put your close up file on top of the wide shot/protection file. Then with the "S" split shortcut in V4, editing will be a breeze.

Good luck.

Gilles

I tape hockey games using 3 cameras. I purchased a fog horn for about $40.00 (CDN)
it comes with a small hand pump like the portable ones you see bicyclists use so I can re-charge it. Once I get all three cameras ready and rolling I will blast the horn two
quick consecutive times. When I am done taping I capture all three clips into the Vegas
timeline and line all three audio to the two blasts from the fog horn. Because I did two
quick blasts I look for the matching two quick spikes on the each of the three audio
tracks. I then use "Excalibur" to align the tracks in sync and then use "Excalibur" to
do my multicamera switching. Once done It creates a Master video at the top of the
Vegas timeline. I then delete all the original three tracks from the timeline, save the
master track as a .veg file and edit away!

Have fun!

Hi Beatnik,

I wonder about using sound to sync tracks. Sound travels a lot slower than light. If all the cameras are close to the source, it's OK. But if the cameras aren't at about the same distance from the source, you might be a couple of frames off, depending on the distance. This is why I recommend a camera flash.

Gilles

>I wonder about using sound to sync tracks. Sound travels a lot slower than light. If all the cameras are close to the source, it's OK. But if the cameras aren't at about the same distance from the source, you might be a couple of frames off, depending on the distance. This is why I recommend a camera flash.

But if you use wireless mics, the speed of sound becomes a non-issue.

Andy

I always use sound to get close and then sync them visually with some easily distinguishable action.

We carry walkie-talkies, and co-ordinate target action, specific players, and scenes verbally and sync the time tracks on the referees whistle. Most sports action seems to occur in 2-20 sec chunks and whistles, horns etc. are in the environment and are fairly predictable and are generally 'relatively' equidistant from the camera and mike. Not Pro but it works for me.

Wouldn't it be nice if consumer-level stuff had SMPTE Timecode I/O?

:)

Andy

Thanks for your tips / advices.

Greets !

For future reference, the speed of sound is approximately 1 foot per millisecond. (That isn't the exact figure, but good enough for most purposes. It also varies somewhat with temperature, hummidity and altitude.) NTSC video is 33 milliseconds per frame.

Anyway, using the flash is the preferred method.

John

One issue your going to face is on the MiniDV camera you're going to have to change tapes unless you start/stop recording. If you can get the clocks on all the cameras resonably in sync can be a help, obviously its not as good as fully synced TCbut you should be able to get it within a second and once you've got your stuff matched that closely getting it spot on is easy.

Just go into the menu on both cameras and with some judicous button pressing line the time of day clocks up.

Hey dvdude, i have 2 sony pd-150 and a sony dsr-250, do they have smpte timecode i/o? AND if so, how do I use it to sync cameras?

Thanks,


Alex

I'm not an expert on this by any means - perhaps John Cline would elaborate for us but....

I'm not familiar with Sony cameras, I did a little research but it would seem that (at least the PD-150) they don't have this capability.

With cameras that do (that tend to be very expensive), a separate jack provides timecode in/out - one camera would then be set up to generate timecode, a second camera would be set up to use the timecode generated by the first one.

This means that the timecodes of both cameras are locked. Having timecode output like this would also enable other timecode-aware devices to lock to one camera. So, an external digital multitrack audio machine (for instance, a Tascam DA-88 with the SY-88 sync card installed), could also lock to this timecode. I'm considering this (for way in the future) as a way to do multitrack audio capture for DD 5.1 mixdowns.

Andy

On the pro cameras they have FREE running timecode, once started stays running even in puse or stop mode, you just need to sync the cameras together and assuming the clocks are accurate the time code remains the same on all cameras all day.

I've seen the feature listed in the manual for some of the more expensive Panasonics.

That raises a question though: If a camera is stopped and restarted, there will be a break in the timecode when a free running generator is used. Most capture programs don't handle timecode breaks too well (I don't know about Vegas in this regard, having been using the program for all of 3 weeks). How do you get around this?

Andy

Using a camera flash is a great idea. I found that sound doesn't work very well. I tape track meets, and even when fairly close to the start, there is a several frame lag between the moment when the smoke/flash comes out of the starter's gun and when the inpulse shows up on the sound line.

No question that a light sync signal will overcome distance variations between multi-cams. The time lag between smoke from the gun and sound from the gun, though, is really moot. If all the cams are a similar distance from the gun, then, sync is sync, no matter if you sync to the sound from the gun or the smoke from the gun.

The point would be to have the delay (between smoke and gun sound) the same between all cams (assuming they are roughly equidistant from the gun).

If you have visual smoke, you might not need a flash for a visual cue - just sync the smoke and you're home free.

My 2 cents.

Caruso

I've just gone through this with a three-camera project in which there were many stops and starts of tapes. But we thought of this and used camera flashes. A lot of the spectators provided additional "sync points."

n.b.: Camera flashes are very fast, only about 1/1000 of a second! That's why they can stop most motion. In a few cases the flashes weren't picked up by one camera or another!

Syncing on sound would have been hopeless. This was inside a 60x40x14' room and the echoes and background sounds did a fine job of obscuring the "edges" of the sounds from the PA system. But I was also running a DAT tape off the back of the mixer, so I had a clean source for the sound feed, and mixed in some of what the cameras picked up to give some ambience.

Now if only Sound Forge would let me mix to analog Dolby Surround, so we could put that ambience in the rear channels when this gets duped onto VHS (ugh)!

Along these lines, I just finished a music video taped multiple times lip synced to the bands CD ( which was the sorce for the audio imported to Vegas ). With little exception, as the video progressed it became increasingly out of sync. Can't imagine it was the cameras ( XL1 and Sony DV-G900 ). With quite a bit of splicing and tweaking I fixed it all the hard way, but would love any thoughts on why this might have happened and how to prevent it in the future.

- Ray

ray@undergroundplanet.com
www.undergroundplanet.com