Hi there, I wonder if anybody can help point me in the right direction…
I am looking to improve the quality of audio/video that I shoot at a cabaret event I do. I have found a great video app called Mavis which will improve the video I shoot, and it can receive timecode from a device such as an Atomos UltraSync BLUE. And I was hoping to sync that up to a multi-track session I recorded directly on my CQ20B. Is it possible for the CQ series to ingest timecode from an external source like this? Or can anybody suggest an alternative (supported) way to sync up audio with video? My Tascam Portacapture X8 can apparently do this, but I was hoping to use my CQ instead.
Thanks!
During the day, I work for Toyota at North America HQ - I’m in learning & development. I frequently shoot & produce training videos of some of our data & tech SMEs (programmers, architects, and data analysts). My video cam is a Panasonic AG-CX350, and I use it’s built-in mic for the "reference” audio. I record the subject matter expert separately via Sennheiser wireless lav whose receiver is connected to a Zoom H6 handheld digital recorder (onto an SD card.
In Final Cut Pro, I can fly in both the camera video+audio, as well as my Zoom’s audio from the SD card, then & take a SWAG at getting the 2 audio sources sync’d up by hand. Finally, FCP has a “sync audio” command that analyzes both audio sources and gets it sync’d up spot-on. It keeps the Zoom’s audio as the primary audio source and mutes the reference audio.
Getting back on A&H topic, if you record your audio using the CQ to the mixer’s SD card + of course, make sure to record audio with your video camera, FCP can sync it all up in post without worrying about timecode. I’ll bet $$ to donuts that Premiere Pro will be able to do this same kind of sync between your video’s reference audio and the SD card audio from your CQ. Just a thought! 
Best wishes!!
Just a few thoughts on this:
I’m afraid your dream solution is probably not feasible, as, at least, I don’t see any way to wirelessly transmit the timecode generated by your Ultrasync to your CQ and also embed it in WAV files of the recording.
Can your cameras even receive this timecode?
In the past (and even today in vintage recordings), when recording multitracks on a tape machine, a separate audio track was sacrificed for the (SMPTE) timecode.
This could then be used to synchronize other devices, for example, via MIDI.
If any of your devices could generate an acoustic SMPTE code from your Ultrasync timecode, you could handle it like your other audio signals and record it in a track of your multitrack.
It would sound something like this:
But I have no idea if your app could do anything with this analog timecode track.
Otherwise: As billshafer already mentioned, it works also without timcode.
I would first load all videos and audios into the app, sync (or let sync) and group them, and only then start your cutting.
I think one of the restrictions is the use of FAT32 file system the CQ software is built on. FAT32 time/date capability is extremely limited.
However, this continuous timecode, as part of a multitrack audio recording, has nothing to do with the time the files were created (“timestamp”) and therefore nothing to do with the file system.
It’s more like a kind of “wordclock”, which you can use, for example, to synchronize multiple audio and video recordings from different devices.
That’s interesting… I wonder if it’s possible for MAVIS to output audio-timecode. You could capture that as an audio track on both the video recorder and the audio recorder. At the very least, it would let you align the audio with the video by matching the pulses.
Years ago my team was transferring old dual-24-track analog audio to digital, and the tapes were synced with a long-forgotten sync box. The only way we could match the sets of tapes up was to visually and mathematically match the time-code pulses.
Since this is all in the digital domain, you should have no “drift” like we had to deal with.
It doesn’t really matter whether the timecode is generated by a device or an app, or whether you download the appropriate one from somewhere.
It just needs to be sent to all participating devices during recording – either via cable or wirelessly.
And important is oc course that the editing software can handle it.
I realize that… but a lot of modern stuff doesn’t generate audio timecode anymore… They expect a wordclock or something more advanced than older-style audio sync signals. I don’t think the CQ devices are BWF either, so the audio files don’t have BWF time metadata, either.
Striping a track with audio timecode would make lining up the audio to video relatively trivial.
