Timecode sync between HPX300 and HPX170

Spotlight Media

Spotlight Media

Well-known member
I have been doing a fair amount of dual camera shoots for Wake Forest and using these 2 cameras. We have done the FreeRun manual sync with some success but would certainly like to sync these 2 cameras correctly to avoid drift, etc. Do you guys have a way to sync these cameras?
I am about to do some extensive Timecode tests this Thursday with the 300 to a Sound Devices recorder and then with the 170 but before we start testing camera to camera and eventually both cameras to the Sound Devices I thought I would ask you guys here first.
I will post what I have found out on Thursday regardless.
 
You can't, really. The 170 doesn't have LTC timecode in/out.

About the best you can do is sync the 300 to the SD, and then use the firewire sync from the 300 to the 170.
 
Thank you Barry, I figured that would most likely be the case. Would the HPX300 then have to be setup for DVCPRO HD rather than AVCintra?
 
During the sync'ing process, yes. But once the HPX170 has read the firewire timecode from the HPX300, then you can switch the 300 back to AVC-Intra.

I think. Actually, I'm not THAT well-versed in the HPX300, so I'll have to put a little caution in there... does the change from DVCPRO-HD to AVC-Intra require a power-down/power-up cycle? If not, then it's likely that the timecode will stay uninterrupted. If it does require a power-down, then ... maybe some sync would be lost. I guess the only way to know is to try it.

Way you could test it would be to do the sync as I suggest, and then use the HPX170 to film the timecode display on the HPX300 and then when you go to play that clip back, you can see the timecode on the 170 and you'll see the 300's timecode in the playback -- do they match? If so, you're good to go. If not, well, at least you'll know how much to offset them by because you'll see the two different timecodes simultaneously.
 
Hi Barry, all great points and my audio engineer and I will be testing these 2 cameras along with the Ambient ACL 203 HD Sync Lockit box with the Sound Devices recorder tomorrow all day so I will through up updates from my experience. Perhaps it will be of some value to folks. Thank you for your input.
 
I certainly recommend shooting the display of one camera with the other. I have used Barry's FW method to sync these two cameras. I seem to get a consistent 4 frames offset each time. It's an easy adjustment in editing, but only if you know it's there.
 
We are in the beginning of testing all these devices now, one thing I wanted to report to Barry... the HPX300 does not require a power down to switch between AVCIntra and DVCProHD.

We are in the process of jamming time code from the 300 to the lockit box and then syncing the Sound Devices recorder to that lockit box. Will let this setup run for about 1 hour or so.

More to come...
 
Shooting a TC display on one camera with the other camera is a good hack. I did shoot some years back with all DVX's and a Betacam Lock off wide shot. I sent TC from the Betacam windowed with the picture and all the DVX's had a monitor near them that they would shoot whenever they reloaded. It was a long music shoot, free run TC. It worked like a charm
 
We are having issues syncing timecode from the HPX300 to the HPX170, when we hit the TC SET button no timecode is arriving from the HPX300. In the menu the 1394 Control and 1394 CMD SEL are blue so they cannot be turned on. This is because I am in either AVCintra or DVCProHD. But does those actually have to be activated in order to send timecode out the firewire cable?

Has anyone done this? I may try it but I wanted to ask first.
 
Barry, exactly. But coming from an IT background there were some situations were a firewire was not able to mount to a computer but was still able to send other signals to and from a device. So I was thinking this could be the same type of deal but from what I understand now is that the firewire port is actually in a OFF state. I will try that once we are done with this next test.

Thanks
 
DVCPROHD 60 with Firewire worked. It also grabbed the picture from the 300 so there is a Firewire setting I have to changed. The timecode was synced between the 300 and 170 successfully though.
 
For those of you that might be interested in what we did today. It may or ma not be helpful but I will share it with you here.
Because we have had so many multiple camera and multiple mic shoots we needed to really research and put time into timecode for all our gear. This gear consists of an HPX300,HPX170,Ambient ACL 203HD sync box, and Sound Devices 788T 8 Channel Portable recorder.

We first sync'd the Ambient to the HPX300 keeping the 300 in Free Run mode, the Ambient then learned the time code of the 300 after a few seconds. Then the Ambient was connected to the Sound Devices recorder so the recorder would read the time code off the Ambient that originated from the 300. We shot several short tests about 5 minutes in duration and a few over 1 hour in duration. We brought the clips off the P2 card and the audio from the Sound Devices into Final Cut Pro 7 and did a merge files lining up according to Time Code. We found that the audio from the Sound Devices/Ambient Box was approx 8/10's of a frame ahead of the onboard audio from the HPX300. Even on the clips that were over an hour in duration we found very little drift, approximately 2/10's of a frame drift from the beginning of the hour long clip to the end of it. This all according to the waveforms of the audio in the timeline of Final Cut Pro. We nudged the audio back 1 frame and we had nearly perfect sycn throughout the entire 1 hour clip. We are going to find out the tolerances of the Ambient box from the manufacturer this coming week. But this difference is almost immeasurable and when we did not compare the different audio channels and just had the audio from the Sound Devices running with the picture it was imperceptible to the eye.

We then took the HPX170 and attached it via Firewire cable to the HPX300 so we could have the HPX170 also grab the timecode from the HPX300. After switching the HPX300 into DVCPROHD60 mode the firewire port was activated. Then setting up the HPX170 to retrieve that timecode via the HPX170 menus and "click" that camera was in perfect sync. We did not have anymore time to test out the 3 devices altogether as we ran out of time, that is for our next testing day.
 
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I have been trying to do the same kind of syncing with the HPX300 and the HPX170. I was successful with all my tests but after I created my multicam clip in fcp, it was off by 4 frames. I would hit control shift and adjust the clip manually to the proper sync. This worked fine but then when I would play the clip and choose which cameras to edit, It would only save my first cut and not cut the rest of the clip. Does anybody know what I am doing wrong?

Thanks
 
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