 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are talking time code, syncing your footage and really something that's changing how we edit and that is the tentacle sync boxes. So a couple of weeks ago I had a shoot for a friend. It was a workshop sort of educational video scenario where we had a main shot locked off of him teaching but then we also wanted to do all these little cutaways of you know details on his hands, details on what he was talking about, close-ups on his face. So how I would normally have done this is start all three cameras running, come in with a clapperboard or just slate it somehow and hope that all three cameras run in sync for the entire time and if we had to cut for any reason we would have to slate it again when we started up. But this meant that the front camera would have been the main camera for most of the time but the two side cameras would have been running the entire time and it would have been really difficult to then having to watch all that footage and work out what small little slivers we wanted of the side coverage. The way around this is to use time code. Time code keeps as many cameras as you want as well as your audio in perfect sync for the duration of the shoot and when you open the files and sync with time code the Premiere or Resolve or whatever application you're using just puts everything where it is. So that meant that you could shoot your front camera, your main camera, and then whenever you felt like there was a little shot of a cutaway worth having and worth putting in the edit you could just set it up, hit record for a couple of seconds, turn it off again and in your timeline you would see this as a nice little insert that you could drop into the main shot. The problem is that DSLRs and most digital cinema cameras don't have time code. They have time code internally meaning actually I can see it on my C200 here in the in the side of the screen it's keeping tabs on this particular clip but there's no way to perfectly sync that with other cameras because the C200 you know despite being a seven and a half thousand dollar camera doesn't have the ability to jam time code. You can't come along with a time code box and tell the camera what the starting time code should be right now but it's not just a C200 issue lots of cameras including the red cameras have real difficulty keeping time code in sync when the camera is turned off and turned on and you end up having to use external time code boxes anyway. So enter tentacle sync. This is the second generation of these devices that have proved incredibly popular. It's a tiny little device basically smaller than a little matchbox. It sits on your camera and connects to the audio port. It outputs a digital audio time code so a series of bleeps and blobs that then get stored in the audio track of your video. Then the software when you open it in tentacle sync software it can read that digital time code audio and put it everything in sync as though it was the native time code of the video clip. The huge improvement with these guys is that they are bluetooth enabled so that you don't have to keep connecting things and unconnecting things from the camera which is you know a real issue when the audio guys come at lunch and want to re-jam the cameras and the camera might be turned off or it might be up in the ceiling or it might be somewhere else. You can do all of this as long as you're in bluetooth range with your phone you can do all of this without bothering anybody. Basically your your phone detects your tentacle sync boxes it shows if they're still they're still rolling how much battery they have if they're still in sync with one another and if they're not you can just hit a button and it will put them all in sync. It has a couple of really interesting little tricks it also has a microphone on it so if you do want audio a scratch track it will put the digital time code audio into one of a stereo pair and leave you with a scratch track on the other. With my C200 I have four tracks of audio so I'm still able to use the two tracks of the main tracks one and two for two different levels of the person speaking and then I'm able to use tracks three and four with this guy into the side. That meant when I did my workshop in New York City a few weeks ago I was able to shoot with the C200 and two 5d mark 3s just have these running the tentacle sync boxes on the sides and then when I got home rather than having to spend a day or a couple of days syncing up all that footage it was you know less than five minutes I brought it in it detected the time code I clicked the button it synced everything up and then output an XML that I could open in Resolve or Premiere and here is all my footage all in sync all ready to start editing it was dream come true. I heard from Canon that the real reason that the C200 was left off the list of approved Netflix cameras was its lack of native time code so with these little boxes and they start around $450 for the Bluetooth set of two of these you can bring your C200 into the time code world and have a really great time code with a great interface and really you know solve a lot of the problems of multi-camera shooting they come with these really clever little jerk stoppers so that the cable that's connecting the box to your audio cable can't get yanked out if the if the box drops down it also has an internal little Velcro pad on the back that's part of the system that's flush with the box so you just put a little piece of the included Velcro on the back of your camera and you can put it there I mean it weighs almost nothing and the battery lasts a couple of days it just repowers through USB-C which is pretty universal and it's a really really great system. Tentacle Sync were kind of enough to send me two of these to do a giveaway with so I would love to hear from you guys what's your worst case scenario audio story that you guys have endured on set leave it in the comments keep it to a paragraph and I'll pick the best story that I find there and I will send you a pair of these tentacle sync boxes with 500 bucks thank you very much for watching please leave your questions in the comments I'll leave links to this stuff on BNH and Amazon also Tentacle Sync's own page we can find out more about how this technology works I'm really happy to run my first giveaway and I hope someone out there needs these but otherwise thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time