Is there a way to encode continuous time onto an audio track?

[Richard Crowley]

You did not mention what camera(s?) you are using. But there is a timecode generator back available for GoPro…
https://gopro.com/news/getting-syncd-with-timecode-systems

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Peter Holt]

The camera is a Sony FDR-1000V. This has no usable input except an analog mike input, which is anyway inaccessible when the camera is in the waterproof housing. The camera has wifi but it is crippled functionally to file transfer to IOS/android devices, or uploading to some Sony-owned streaming service. Even bluetooth versions have no such capability over bluetooth.

I chose the Sony for the small frontal area, which makes it more suited to aircraft usage.

It is interesting that a solution does exist. However, it seems that it is limited to recording the audio *in the camera*. Is there an audio recorder which takes Line In and which does the same thing?

[Richard Crowley]

The more expensive FDR-X3000 apparently has built-in timecode, but your FDR-1000V is a consumer-targeted, low-budget model.

There appears to be a mic input connector on the bottom (!) of the FDR-1000V. It would be simple enough to make a psuedo-SMPTE TimeCode generator from a postage-stamp size Arduino board. It wouldn’t be frame-accurate, but it would get you in the ballpark (within a few seconds) With a couple of those, you could feed one into the camera, and the other into your audio recorder. You would “jam-sync” them together before taking off. Or you could get the more expensive FDR-X3000 or some other camera that natively supports timecode.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Peter Holt]

Interesting… I looked at the 3000 but it uses a different waterproof housing so I would have to re-make my whole camera assembly.

Also I have no means of running a wire to the camera. It would have to run over bluetooth. I am not 100% happy about that either because you don’t want a piece of equipment, which cannot be turned off by the pilot, radiating anything, on an aircraft which might have to make an instrument landing… That is why I won’t use the wifi on the 1000V to start/stop recording.

Is there a standalone timecode recorder which would work with Vegas in the way I originally described?

[Richard Crowley]

I don’t follow what your proposed workflow is or exactly what is a “standalone timecode recorder”?

BTW: BlueTooth and WiFi both run at 2.4GHz. So I don’t understand your reluctance to use WiFI, but willingness to use BlueTooth which operates at exactly the same frequency band?

There is nothing on an aircraft, general or commercial, that operates anywhere near 2.4GHz. Except maybe the flight attendant’s MP3 player. It is guaranteed impossible that the 10s of millions of passengers ALL turned off their electronic gadgets each and every time a flight took off and landed. I appreciate extreme safety as much as the next guy, and I don’t want to crash anymore than you (or the pilot) does. But all the fru-fru about “turn off all your gadgets” things has been proved to be superstition unsupported by science.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Peter Holt]

“I don’t follow what your proposed workflow is or exactly what is a “standalone timecode recorder”?”

I would like to be able to drop an audio event onto the timeline and have it align with the video, where there is video.

“BTW: BlueTooth and WiFi both run at 2.4GHz. So I don’t understand your reluctance to use WiFI, but willingness to use BlueTooth which operates at exactly the same frequency band?”

I don’t want to use ither, but there is a huge difference in power.

“There is nothing on an aircraft, general or commercial, that operates anywhere near 2.4GHz. Except maybe the flight attendant’s MP3 player. It is guaranteed impossible that the 10s of millions of passengers ALL turned off their electronic gadgets each and every time a flight took off and landed. I appreciate extreme safety as much as the next guy, and I don’t want to crash anymore than you (or the pilot) does. But all the fru-fru about “turn off all your gadgets” things has been proved to be superstition unsupported by science.”

I don’t fly an airliner. They are well shielded, and are built to a high standard when it comes to EMC. Also there are other factors e.g. you can saturate a a circuit whose bandwidth is say only 150MHz, with a 2.4GHz signal.

[Richard Crowley]

Does your editing software read SMPTE timecode from an audio channel? If the external camera is running continuously, then you could feed a SMPTE TC stream into the second channel of your audio recorder. You could select the TC time as “run-time” (number of minutes and seconds since you started the camera). Then the audio recording would always know the start point relative to the beginning of the video clip.

If your editing software does NOT read SMPTE TC, then you could make a “voice tag” stream that announces the running time every 5 or 10 seconds. That would at least get you into the ballpark.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Bruce Watson]

[Peter Holt] “”I don’t follow what your proposed workflow is or exactly what is a “standalone timecode recorder”?”

I would like to be able to drop an audio event onto the timeline and have it align with the video, where there is video.”

This requires four things. First, a timecode generator of some kind. The generator has to provide timecode to the video and audio recorders. Second, a video recorder that can record the provided timecode in some way, while it records video. Third, an audio recorder that can record the provided timecode in some way, while it records audio. Forth, an NLE that can read the timecodes recorded by the video and audio recorders, and use these timecodes to line up the video and audio when you drop the video and audio onto your timeline.

You may be able to get around not having specific time code functionality by recording the timecode onto an available audio track. You’d use something like Tentacle Sync maybe (I’ve never used it, only read about it, and there are undoubtedly competitors as well). As to NLEs that can use audio timecode directly, you’d have to research it.

Can you get away without dealing with timecode? For a few minutes, probably. But your video recorder is going to drift, as will your audio recorder, and there’s no telling if they’ll drift together or apart, or at what rates. Thus… SMPTE timecode was invented.

[Peter Holt]

OK, guys, many thanks… looks like I need to go up a learning curve on SMPTE ?

Vegas can use SMPTE, it seems.

Reading up on this, SMPTE involves storing time on every frame of a video and similarly storing time on every sample (?) on an audio track.

But, surely, an mpeg video file already has time embedded in every frame, surely? What does SMPTE add?

I read some web material on SMPTE in audio and it embeds the digital data in the audio, so you need a special player to strip it out, otherwise you can clearly hear it.

Searches on equipment tend to lead to this product every time: https://tascam.com/product/dr-701d/ That does just audio, with masses of features. I don’t mind the price if it actually works with Vegas Pro 13… and preferably earlier versions like MSP11 which I have on a laptop I travel with.

I also see a lot of stuff about timecode generators. Why is this a separate function, when everything containing a microprocessor has (or can have) a real time clock for about $1? (I am an electronics hardware/software designer). Presumably the DR-701D contains all that and you just feed in Line In. I have a line level audio signal connection from the aircraft intercom.

[Peter Holt]

Reading some more, it looks like the key issue is that you need split-second sync between the sound recorder clock (which generates the timecode) and the camera clock.

And this is hard to achieve. One could easily achieve it over say a 10 hour project (fairly cheap quartz crystal oscillator tolerance is say 5ppm, which is c. 0.1 sec over 10 hours) but how do you sync the two to start with?

That is presumably why the DR-701 takes the video signal from the camera, extracts the time from that, and uses *that* to generate the timecode recorded onto the audio. Then nobody needs to sync anything.

But clearly this won’t work with a remotely mounted camera to which there is no access before the recording session.

The best one will be able to do is to set two two clocks as accurately as possible.

Does this make sense?