Help a timecode rookie

[Tom Maloney]

Hi all, sorry if my post is too simple or seems ridiculous to any of you. I mainly do audio mixing taking audio directly to a video camera so I have no experience with timecode I see you all talking about. So I am trying to educate myself what is the normal setup you use. I take it you have to have a video camera that will accept code or output it? What I do not understand is the chain. Normally do you use a Denecke slate to generate code to the camera and then to your audio recorder? Is this all cabled together? If one of you has the time I just would appreciate how you normally jam code to a recorder and camera. Thanks in advance.

[old school]

Hey Tom, the way it works out here, (LA) the sound mixers recorder has a time code generator built in that becomes the master clock for the shoot. We feed TC to the slate and the camera if it takes TC. This system can be all cabled up, but it seldom is. We jam the Denecke slate our time code rate and that holds for 5 or 6 hours before we need to re jam. Same w many of the cameras. Not hard to learn if you can get your hands on the gear and test it.

CrewC

[Tom Maloney]

Thank you , makes much more sense now.

[Philip Perkins]

The Denecke people are very nice about explaining how their products work if you have specific questions--they've helped me a lot over the years.

Philip Perkins

[Zack]

I <3 lock-it boxes!

[studiomprd]

always specify and use "SMPTE/EBU Timecode"

[Charlie Parra]

Thanks for the kind words Philip and Richard!

[Richard Ragon]

Here's the link to the Marc Wielage article:

http://www.coffeysound.com/media/The_Coffey_Files_-_Winter_2009.pdf

-Richard

[Marc Wielage]

No, it's really Charlie Parra's article -- I only kibbutzed a little bit in the background. He's the real expert, "the king of all timecode."

--Marc W.