Android & iOS app with frame accurate (b/t two devices) time of day

BrandonT

BrandonT

Well-known member
Does anyone know of an app (or apps), preferably for both iOS and Android (but I'll take whichever suggestions you have) that can do this:

I'd like to be able to have two people in two separate locations use an app on each their phones to get a frame accurate time of day. It would be accurate to the frame between the two devices. So the time would need to be synced by GPS (probably the best way for accuracy), cell towers (could vary slightly across different carriers), or via a web server.

I'm sure some of you will have suggestions with more dedicated equipment, or for a single device. But for what I'm doing, I'll have two people shooting at football games, and I will not be on site. One camera will be up top, and one on the field. So it needs to be frame accurate between devices. They could just shoot the same slate app at the same time, before the game starts. But I'd rather do this, if it's possible.

I've used SL Digislate for a while on Android. It works for some things. But I don't think it would be frame accurate across two devices, unless they are rooted and the device's time is set by GPS. I stopped doing the root stuff a while back. I will test it with stock phones, though, and see.
 
If the cams are TC capable, why not have them jam sync free-run timecode between them before the game starts. Unless the cameras TC section is just REALLY bad, the amount of drift during the time frame of a typical football game should be inconsequential.
 
Run&Gun said:
If the cams are TC capable, why not have them jam sync free-run timecode between them before the game starts. Unless the cameras TC section is just REALLY bad, the amount of drift during the time frame of a typical football game should be inconsequential.
Click to expand...

Well the Panasonic AC130A can sync TC. But my C100 Mark II cannot, unfortunately. I used to have an AF100, so that was nice to be able to sync it with the AC130A.

We ended up setting the TC by hand. As in, have it set to free run, set it back to all 0's, and then both press the confirm button on a "3, 2, 1, Mark!". This was done over PTT radio communication. It was only off by 6 frames. Not too bad!
 
If you have a tc generator that has an ltc output, you could record that tc on one track of audio and jam sync the other camera. I forget which editors can extract the tc from an audio track, so you'd need to check that.

I'd also recommend sending the ltc in at a very low level so it won't contaminate the other channels.
 
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