This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] timecode sync and slomo footage

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] timecode sync and slomo footage

Feed the LTC to one of the audio channels, as a backup. Wire, transmitter or Lockit, any will do,

Bouke

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Op 11 aug. 2014 om 19:03 heeft "Michael Brockington mbrock321@gmail.com [Avid-L2]" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> het volgende geschreven:

I'm working on a documentary using the F55 as the main camera, shooting
23.98p.

We are jam-syncing the F55 from the sound recorder, which works OK if
the 2 are re-jammed fairly often.

Problems arise when the F55 shoots offspeed, which happens often. Camera
and sound are in freerun. When the camera shoots off-speed it drops
into rec-run mode until switched back to 23.98. It also uses up
timecode numbers at a different rate until it goes back to normal
speed. If it's shooting at 48 fps, for instance, it will use 2 seconds
of timecode for every second of realtime that it shoots.

So any time the camera shoots off-speed, the time-code sync is broken in
an unpredictable way between sound and camera until they are rejammed.
In the uncontrolled conditions of a documentary shoot, there's zero
chance production will rejam every time the camera goes off-speed and
back again.

I imagine the same issue comes up with other cameras, and I'm wondering
if folks have a strategy to deal with this.

Would a lock-it box help in this situation? Or would it scramble the
camera's brains when shooting off-speed, since the TC rates wouldn't
match? If the lockit box could force the camera back to free-run TC
that would sync with sound when it was switched back to 23.98, it seems
like that might create a backwards timecode break, with timecode
overlapping the slomo footage that had just been shot. Is that likely
to create any problems in a file-based camera with unique filenames, the
way it would in a tape-based world?

Thanks for any insights,
--Michael