Red and Clocking TC for seperate sound

[Axel]

Especially for documentaries it would be nice to have the option to shoot seperate sound. To avoid drifting the clocking of sound recorder and camera should be extremly accurate. Sound devices opted to integrate in their marvelous machine 744T the "Ambient clocking board". The german company is specialised in these items and if camera an recorder are equiped with their clocking TC stays in sync for at least 4-5 hours. Now it would be very desirable to integrate such an accurate board into RED and we could go out shooting without all these cables again. www.ambient.de

[Roxco]

Why not just use GPS clocks for precision and accuracy?

And with some location metadata - who knows...

Rosco

P.S. http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/07/how_to_gps_tag.html

[jbeale]

There are a few boxes out there that generate SMPTE timecode from GPS but the ones I've seen are large bulky rackmount things. No reason why you couldn't have a handheld-size device to do this, that could be mounted on cameras or audio recorders- maybe someone will make one soon?

by the way, you might think that GPS devices are no use in urban canyons, indoors etc. That used to be true, but it is not so true anymore with the modern receiver chips. Useful GPS reception is now possible in most indoor environments (underground or underwater of course is still not possible). Indoor position fixes are less accurate but timing is still within a microsecond, more than enough for motion picture sync!

Note: if you have a GPS tracklog and want to geolocate your still camera images, the MS WWMX Location Stamper
http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/eadb6a33-b1b8-4c4d-b713-64fae728f74f/Details.aspx
makes it easy and automatic. Here's a nice tutorial on it:
http://hikesandbikes.blogspot.com/2006/10/life-of-geolocated-blog-post.html

[pvanscherpe]

I would be happy to know if Red accepts an external TC.

[Stuart English]

Yes, RED ONE does accept external timecode.

One of our system tests is to use an Ambient Lockit Box timecode / trilevel sync generator to drive the camera's external timecode input.

[Axel]

thats very good news. i only have good experience with ambient stuff.