Syncing two cameras?

[jzucker]

Excuse my ignorance. I'm a guitarist attempting to do an instructional jazz guitar DVD. I would like to have a picture in picture effect where I could show the entire guitar with picture-in-picture enlargements of the picking and left hand techniques.
I have experimented with scaling and masking to create a superimposed image but when scaling up the image, the scaled version is always somewhat blurry.

Note that I am using a consumer camera Canon Optura Xi for this. One thought was to simply buy the HD version of the camera such as the HV20 with the idea that doing the scaling with a bigger image to start with would result in higher image quality but I also have thought about using a second camera which would be zoomed in on the left or right hands. The problem is that I cannot afford a pair of pro cameras that can use some type of smpte time sync. I'm sure I could manuall sync the images up since I'd only be using audio on one of them but I was just wondering what the proper techniques for this sort of application were...

Thanks in advance,

Jaz

 

[Huy Vu]

Yea, scaling up footage will always make it blurry. A 2nd camera is the way to go for this. There's no need to get cameras with timecode. It's pretty simple. The idea is to create a visual and audio cue so that you have a common point to sync the footage up in post. This can be something as simple as start recording and have someone clap their hand once in front of the two cameras, or if you want to get a bit fancier, use a slate.

In editing, look at the waveform from both cameras and sync up to the peak of the clap, and it will sync.

 

[jzucker]

Yea, scaling up footage will always make it blurry. A 2nd camera is the way to go for this. There's no need to get cameras with timecode. It's pretty simple. The idea is to create a visual and audio cue so that you have a common point to sync the footage up in post. This can be something as simple as start recording and have someone clap their hand once in front of the two cameras, or if you want to get a bit fancier, use a slate.

In editing, look at the waveform from both cameras and sync up to the peak of the clap, and it will sync.

Thanks! Very simple and effective.