Originally purchased 3 cameras to record live DJ set of approx 1 hr duration.
Had each camera connected to a different phone, but then realised each camera recording would drift in time depending on the phone being used (older phone or newer phone).
Bought SD cards for each device but then realised that the recordings get split into small time durations.
Has anyone successfully configured more than one camera to recording at the same time, and be able to sync the videos without drift?
Maybe this will required 3rd party software from reading other online posts, but thought I would check here int he community first.
I would be very surprised that you would be able to get exact frame sync from any inexpensive camera. You would have to fix it in post.
The “proper” way would be to run each camera through a Time Base Corrector with a common sync signal.
That’s fair enough. I’m new to this and maybe didn;t understand the limitation.
What I have been doing is setting a visual cue at the start and end of the recording, triming all camera recordinds to that cue, and then stretching or shirnking the speed to make them all line up.
Unfortunately even doing that doesn’t work very well, and also is very time consuming.
Would you have an opinion on whether I should stick with the wyze setup for this? Can I maybe adjust the frame rate recording on the cameras so that when they’re recording to the phone it’s at least close?
Or should I go for a different camera setup alltogether?
No worries if this is not your forte!
If you want to use these cams for that, I would use the SD card then use a “joiner” program to combine the 1 minute files into a single video per camera.
You can then use video editing software to use your visual cue to synch them up.
Whether they’ll still be synched after an hour, I can’t say, but as long as they have a time source/internet connection, one would think they’d be pretty accurate. But as @K6CCC says, these cams aren’t really designed for this, they use high compression and are just inexpensive recording devices so I don’t think millisecond accurate precision (which over the course of an hour can become seconds) was accounted for in the design.
For this you might want a more higher end setup. Check out Black Magic. Lots of their gear is becoming more affordable. You will need cameras with HDMI outputs.
@StevenA@dave27 Thanks for the suggestions.
I’ll give the 1 min joiner a try before I spend more money.
If that’s a long an annoying process, HDMI will be next. Appreciate you both
I’ve worked as a video engineer - that’s the guy that makes all the cameras look the same and work together. To time sync the cameras requires cameras that can accept a time sync sent from the video switcher to each camera. The cameras then sync to that signal.
The other solution is a time base corrector that takes a sync signal from the video switcher and the TBC buffers the incoming signal so that it is sent our of the TBC in sync. TBCs are normally used when a video source is a video recorder, or something that you can’t send sync to - for example, that blimp shot at a pro football game. Almost anything connected via WiFi would fall into that category.