SMPTE question

[Rocksteady]

I'm going to be shooting a music video in a couple of weeks and the band wants to use SMPTE. I understand that it's a way to tightly sync up your audio with your video using timecode, but that's about all I know about it. Anyone have any experiance using SMPTE?

 

[mb72378]

Are you talking about SMPTE timecode specifically? (society of motion picture television engineers)

 

[Ted Spencer]

Musicians and other music biz types use the term "SMPTE", pronounced like a word ,"simpty", to mean time code. In music-only applications it's usually 30 frame though, which is important to know when working with video, which is 29.97 (in the US, anyway). Otherwise, it's the same thing as what video types call time code.

In order to accomodate the band, you might want to ask them what they need SMPTE TC for. They might for example, want to shoot while playing to an audio file or DAW that transmits and/or can chase time code. If they play/lip-sync to the audio, and you record the audio's TC to a track on your camera, it can be used later to sync the music up again (camera's audio TC track = master, audio device = reader/slave). If you're doing it that way, just use whatever TC rate the music track was made with even if it's 30f. You're only using it to play back into the audio device/DAW so it can slave to it and sync up with the picture.

Musicians and studio engineers (like me) use this process all the time, so the band or whoever they're woking with in that capacity should know how to handle it on the audio side.

I hope all this is reasonably clear, not to mention helpful : )

 

[Rocksteady]

Thanks a ton, very helpful.