signal generator

[MovieStuff]

What I love about this whole process is watching everyone "re-invent" stuff that the old Super8 Sound company did back in the seventies. They used to have a HUGE catalog that had every possible invention and gizmo that people had created. One was an in-line 1F spike generator created pretty much like Mattias has suggested. It was based on a 1.5 volt AA battery and worked perfectly as the synch circuits for the Super8 Sound recorder didn't care what the wave form looked like as long as there were descreet pulses.

I used to have one and my buddies and I would play a game where we would feed a line signal into the synch circuit of the recorder and use a microphone and our own voices to make 24fps "chirps". The idea was to see who could hold synch the longest. We sounded like Arab warriors or something. It was pretty funny and we actually got pretty good but the main thing is that the synch circuit could have cared less whether the sound came from a "proper" tone or just us making bird calls.

Roger

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Roger Evans
MovieStuff
http://www.afterimagephoto.tv/moviestuff.html

[#Pedro]

Roger,
using a microfone, you DID create a proper tone (audio signal). The frequency doesn?t matter at all. 1000 Hz is only a convienient way to go, a kind of standard.

THe problem is with the spikes, that can be created either by interrupting a battery with the flash contact, by loose cable contacts, by swithching on the light, by swithcing off the fridge and so on.
And then you have spent the whole day shooting direct sound scenes, with setup, actors, with all the effort, and afterwards the number of pulses doesn?t match with the number of frames - same as wild sync.
And it would have been only 50 cent for a real reliable solution, with the same sync quality like a $500 crystal conversion!

No- we are not re-inventing 1970ies technology - but we are using a visual media of that time and needing adequate and compatible audio recording systems, that are affordable and easy to handle.

Pedro

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