4 Track

Noiz2 said:
The biggest problem with doing it this way is that it is completely nonstandard and generally speaking people and software will assume that if there is valid TC in a file that it is going to match the TC on the other files that go with it
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"Throughout the course of the shoot day, jam sync timecode tends to drift slightly, causing some synced clips to be a few frames off. This isn’t always the case, but it happens often enough that I’ve found waveform syncing to be more reliable." - Sofi Marshall

https://blog.frame.io/2017/05/15/sync-clips-in-davinci-resolve/
 
Nice link.

But I would point out that I said "nonstandard" not nobody does it, and I was talking about having non matching TC not using audio for syncing. You always will be phasing in, which is essentially what Resolve is doing.

Also ironically the post also points out the bogusness of the "need" for TC on the sound recorder. The two clips in the demo have modification dates off by almost two months and the TC shown is very far off so neither could be of any use even in finding what clips go together.

Lastly she is doing projects where she is not really working with a team. If you are on your own or with a tight group that works together a lot then you can get away with non-standard workflows. Which was why I mentioned that in my post. If you are working on a bigger budget feature with a real crew the flexibility to work odd diminishes a lot.

Having been on the other side I can say with no hesitation that the biggest hurdle to get over in trying to get a gig on a big film is a lot of credits with no-budget projects. A post supervisor sees a lot of small projects and no big ones and they assume you have some bad work habits you need to be trained out of and that is going to cost them time.

I'm not saying don't take the small gigs, you have to take what you can, well mostly. And go ahead and use some weird workflow if it helps you get the job done. But realize that it is not a big budget workflow and IF you have aspirations of doing big budget films you should at least know the way things are "properly" done.

I do a lot of small projects these days and I do not use a big budget workflow because it is not very efficient and unnecessary when you are not on a big crew.

Related to that the quote you used points to the differences in bigger budget and lower budget. No big budget shoot would jam in the morning and not re-jam during the day, and multi cam shoots would be using tri-level to stay in sync. Even with out any of that big budget equipment is not going to drift noticeably over a shoot day. You re-jam because your on a big budget shoot and if you have something that is 100% sure, you also have a backup.
 
I just noticed that at the bottom of her article she has a link from a sound supervisor pointing out why you should not sync her way.
https://blog.frame.io/2017/04/10/how-to-keep-your-sound-editor-happy/

And his points are really Big Budget workflow issues. I would guess that he has worked on a fair number of bigger projects and has been doing this awhile. The reason I suspect the later is because some of his reasoning really harken back to when audio was being digitized in to NLE's and the quality was pretty poor. Today with everything being file based and digital the quality from the picture dept. should be the same as the original recordings. Getting the full files is also of limited use on a low budget project because who has the time to wade through all of that. You will want to have them just incase you need to go looking for an alt but I'm not going to replace the NLE audio with production unless the editor somehow screwed it up.

They both though make the same point, which is talk to the post people before you shoot. I personally see where he is coming from and on a big budget I would agree but on smaller projects I would be very happy with files synced in Resolve and coming in an AAF.
 
Jim Simon said:
Dave Fisk and Alex H answered it well enough.

"You'll...need to...increase your budget for a recorder. "

"the cheapest recorder that offers everything you want is the TASCAM DR-701D at $500 new."

Thank you everyone.
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I'd still recommend going for the Zoom F4 over the DR701D, as the leap in price is small while the leap in features is HUGE

Jim Simon said:
I understand. I also don't care. Knowing which clips go together is all I need. Syncing is done with audio.
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Without accurate time code then neither you or the PC will have any idea which clips go together, or at least no better idea than just eyeballing the date stamps on the creation of the files themselves which you see in your file browser.
(unless... you use the audio wave forms to match up files, like how PluralEyes or Premiere CC do it, but you don't need any sort of time code for that)
 
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Noiz2 said:
Personally I'm dubious that there are recorders that do this. I haven't found any but supposedly they do exist. In professional uses non referenced TC is worse than useless because of the problem mentioned above..
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Good point.

Bad/nonstandard time code is worse than no time code at all!

Noiz2 said:
The work around I guess would be to sync the tracks you can and then snap the corresponding tracks to the ones that did sync.
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Yup, agreed.

Noiz2 said:
The reason it's a OMB issue is if you are going to sound post or even have a sound editor you know they will have lots of software to convert and transform just about anything to just about anything. It's one of the "costs of doing business" in sound post. You are always getting files that need to converted into something else.
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This again. x1000

But even in a OMB situation I'd still suggest converting the files if really needed, like people have already suggested to the OP, as it is pretty simple/quick/cheap.

Noiz2 said:
To me it sounds like a workflow that has only been tested on paper because I can see a lot of places where it could fall apart, as in the board feed is different enough from what the camera picks up that you end up having to sync everything by ear. There were a lot of that kind of failure when PluralEyes first started being used. To get the software to work your tracks needed to be very similar to each other. It was a workflow that was not a replacement for TC but a way to replace the compressed often noisy audio that DSLR's had with the same track recorded on a better recorder. The "proper" workflow then was to feed the same audio to both the DSLR and the recorder. If you did that then it worked like magic. Second best was to match a better track to on camera recordings and that worked pretty well most of the time. But then folks started thinking they could record anything at the same time and the software would somehow figure it out and the whole workflow fell apart.
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Yup, PluralEyes is perfect for replacing the very bad sounding yet broadly very similar sounding (if you ignore bit depth / noise floor / odd bit of peaking / etc) DSLR sound.

However if you're saying doing a wide shot where the camera can't pick up the actors' dialogue off in a distance, or in a noisy environment (or any of many other reasons), then the DSLR audio and the audio in your sound recorder can be massively different! (unless you're using a camera hop, to feed the camera a decent reference track from your bag) And PluralEyes will likely massively fail in these situations.

Jim Simon said:
"Throughout the course of the shoot day, jam sync timecode tends to drift slightly, causing some synced clips to be a few frames off. This isn’t always the case, but it happens often enough that I’ve found waveform syncing to be more reliable." - Sofi Marshall
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I have no idea who this person is, but from briefly looking at IMDB it looks like she has worked on a few ultra low budget projects.

Probably with those kind of projects you'll come across a lot of people either not using TC or using it incorrectly, so yeah, going for waveform syncing will indeed often be a better idea. This doesn't mean TC is a worse idea however for everyone else.

But hey, even in that situation, using TC to sync everything up in a snap then just correcting a few using waveforms sync, is going to be quicker for many people.
 
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IronFilm said:
Without accurate time code then neither you or the PC will have any idea which clips go together
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That's not true, though. As long as the start times of all clips show up close to each other, it's very easy to figure out which audio clips go with which video clips. My audio op knows to start recording as soon as he sees me filming, so the clips are never more than a few seconds off in start time. That works well enough to find matching clips.

And thanks for the tip on the F4. I'll keep an eye on the used market to see if any fall into my budget.
 
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RE: PluealEyes

Jim Simon said:
Except, it doesn't work with Resolve.
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And Resolve has the same or better functionality built in.

Slightly OT, I found it interesting that both blog posters seemed to think of Resolve as a tool used to get footage into a "real" NLE. While is is a bit new on the market (as a NLE) it is a pretty decent NLE and even a lot of plugins will work with it. I can see the hesitancy of older users not wanting to switch, I still use PT because I know it well and am really fast with it, but? It seemed weird to me that they both were talking about Resolve like it was some specialty ingest tool.
 
Jim Simon said:
That's not true, though. As long as the start times of all clips show up close to each other, it's very easy to figure out which audio clips go with which video clips. My audio op knows to start recording as soon as he sees me filming, so the clips are never more than a few seconds off in start time. That works well enough to find matching clips.

And thanks for the tip on the F4. I'll keep an eye on the used market to see if any fall into my budget.
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True and if you included a little more of the quote it would have said that there was no benefit over the time stamp that all recorders put on files. And that has been the point all along, not that what you are asking for wouldn't do what you want it for but that you are going to pay a lot more for a feature that is simply a duplicate of something that already exists.
 
Jim Simon said:
I consider my projects below even that. I film weddings. High end workflows (and budgets) aren't relevant.
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to you.

You started the tread and it is your question so that is a valid point. These threads are read by a lot of people and generally we try to answer the specific question and also the broader question. Too many times on lists you will see "answers" that imply they are universal but really only apply to one specific situation.

If this thread had started as a question on a best practices for syncing sound for wedding and event videographers it might well have gone in a different direction.

I'm not big on TC for low budget features but for events real jammed TC is probably the fastest way to go. Though from what I have read WAV syncing in Resolve is pretty fast.

Part of my aversion to TC on low budget projects is that are often being done with folks who don't have any real experience with TC and if not done correctly it can be more of a problem than not having it in the first place.
 
Noiz2 said:
you are going to pay a lot more for a feature that is simply a duplicate of something that already exists.
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Actually, I think the "timecode" is incidental here. It's the "4 channel file" that's the crux of my need, and what doesn't seem to be available on DARs in my budget. All the models, both in and above budget, record the "timecode" that I need.
 
Noiz2 said:
for events real jammed TC is probably the fastest way to go.
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It's just not practical, though. Even if an affordable device existed that could wirelessly send timecode to all hardware, the hardware that can accept it is generally outside the budget's of event shooters.
 
Jim Simon said:
It's just not practical, though. Even if an affordable device existed that could wirelessly send timecode to all hardware, the hardware that can accept it is generally outside the budget's of event shooters.
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True. The exception might be the DR-701. IF your camera puts TC out on the HDMI signal then the 701 will jam to that. But in general only big events are going to have the budget for real TC gear.

The problem, probably, for getting poly WAV files is that it's not a consumer format and most of the cheap recorders are really aimed a consumers. If they had the option to do poly WAV you just know they would get all kinds of grief from folks who inadvertently recorded in it and now can't figure out where their tracks went...
 
Jim Simon said:
It's just not practical, though. Even if an affordable device existed that could wirelessly send timecode to all hardware, the hardware that can accept it is generally outside the budget's of event shooters.
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The Sound Devices MixPre-6 can jam sync to timecode through the 1/8" TRS aux input. That's a <$1000 recorder that can do it. Couple that with a pair of Ambient Recording NanoLockit transceivers ($565 for a 2-unit kit) and you can keep wireless TC sync between recorder and camera. The NanoLockit has an internal TC generator to the output cable and over its own wireless network, and a second transceiver will sync over the network.

$1500 for a digital mixer/recorder that records ISO tracks, plus wireless TC sync, is dirt cheap in the real world of production sound. That may seem like a lot to ultra-low-budget folks, but sound can often cost a lot more than the camera in order to be done right.

Of course, if your camera cannot either receive or send TC through anything but HDMI, the NanoLockit won't be fore you. But I think what Scott is getting at with time and date stamp is that (assuming your date and time settings are accurate in both camera and sound recorder) these give you a reliable, quick reference.

Many of these recorders also allow for customization of file naming scheme, and if that is set up for the specific project, and for each day of that project, then the file names should make for quick work locating the right files.

As I said earlier, I've done a whole lot of non-sync work and much of that has been in one-man-band situations. Though i don't do event work, and I usually have time to use a slate, date and time stamps and customized file naming are my go-to resources.
 
He's doing weddings though and weddings are pretty much impossible to slate.

Good point on the file names, even the DR40 I believe can put the time in the file name and that would have the advantage over the time stamp in being harder to accidentally change.
 
Jim Simon said:
Actually, I think the "timecode" is incidental here. It's the "4 channel file" that's the crux of my need, and what doesn't seem to be available on DARs in my budget. All the models, both in and above budget, record the "timecode" that I need.
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Well then if the quality is acceptable to your projects then the DR-70 will record 4 mono files which should work for you and it's under $300.

You might need WaveAgent to get you to a Poly file but it might work with out that since Resolve can sync multiple files, or at least that is how I read the manual haven't actually done it.

You might also bring them all into the time line and link them. At that point Resolve ought to deal with them like a Poly.

Again I have not done this workflow so... But you might get better sync with mono files, unless there is a way to tell Resolve which track of the polly to look at.
 
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