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How come FS7's stay in sync?


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I am curious how two FS7's, with nothing jamming them, will often have their timecode very close to one another (not perfect of course, but visibly close) but my mixer is always off quite quickly? Surely a professional audio recorder should hold better TC than an FS7? My theory is that the cameras reset to some sort of internal clock, to the minute, and so when you turn two of them on they "appear" to be in sync. 

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The Sony FS7s have their own clock design (not as stable as whats in our recorder and lockits, but it exists) Since they have the same tech, their drift is consistent. So they may seem in sync, even if they drift away from your reference.

 

Also, what are you referencing the drift to? Time of day? another timecode source? Unless you are using drop frame timecode, timecode time will fall 3.6 frames an hour out from clock time, not because of drift, but because of the frame rate.

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That's kind of what I thought. I'm comparing two (or more) FS7s to timecode in my recorder. Even after a day the guys turn their cameras on and claim "timecode is bang on" meanwhile my recorder appears "off" and I need to set it to match the cameras. 

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One caution--looking at TC displays on different devices and having them appear to be counting identically is not really determining if the devices are really in dead sync.  They may be close, but close is not really good enough if the post workflow involves TC autosync processes.  If you have worked in post you know that feeling one gets when the sync of an entire project starts to feel off, possibly in both directions to a different degree in different shots.  It is FAR better to lock everything up (if the cameras permit it) so you KNOW that post is starting off with dead-on sync.

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Yes I know, but on this show nobody has the TC extension for the FS7. I give them a guidetrack for syncing but they seem to still want timecode "close."

 

I was just curious how two cameras can possibly be "close" with nothing feeding them and they've been turned off for 12 hours.

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1 minute ago, Valentine said:

Yes I know, but on this show nobody has the TC extension for the FS7. I give them a guidetrack for syncing but they seem to still want timecode "close."

 

I was just curious how two cameras can possibly be "close" with nothing feeding them and they've been turned off for 12 hours.

"Close" is a relative term, right?  In a lot of post workflows inter-camera sync is just ignored anymore, so "close" TC is just to put them in the ballpark.  I can see the importance of this on a dramatic shoot or a commercial etc where there will be multiple takes of a given action+dialog, it helps with keeping track of what they have even if the sync doesn't need to be frame-accurate.

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  • 3 weeks later...

It's important to also have the internal clock of FS7 very similar to the timecode clock, if they're also using the 'slo-mo' mode on their cameras, since the slo-mo option uses the internal clock as reference not the timecode. This then is dangerous in post because you can have two video files with the same timecode.....

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