Like everyone else, I’d love to not have to worry about syncing cameras. However, I am one who does not control all the gear going into the shoot. I use various photographers I know. It’s pretty likely their cameras aren’t synced to mine (aka, Apple’s Time Servers or whatnot). It’s nice if they are, and I try to get them to do this, but in all likelihood, it just doesn’t happen down to the second, right? This has become a bigger issue now that I have more people working with me than just Zack.
So! I’ve read and read and all I can find is that people do one of three things:
1 – They just try to find a shot that happened around the same time and use the EXIF stamp to figure out how far to offset the other camera. Fine, but this can be off a good bit, and you still have to hunt for a shot at a similar time. Not fun! Especially if you are dealing with several cameras.
2 – They all shoot a frame at (sorta around) the exact same time as a baseline. Again, not all that convenient, especially if you have each person using more than one camera.
3 – They all set their menu for a predetermined time at (again, sorta around) the exact same time. Again, if you have more than one camera per shooter, you’ll need more arms than you have.
I was recently thinking about this as I was running into this more and more, and I realized that you have to go pretty far back to have a camera that will display a static time or a time where the seconds don’t count on screen. Ok! So why not use the baseline camera (your main rig) and just shoot the screen of the other camera(s) as their time counts? That gets you down to the second (as seen above – and again, important that their seconds count on screen).
What if you have multiple cameras? Have every camera photograph your main camera’s screen. Simple as that! That way you have your time difference locked into each camera’s individual files. No need to go back and forth and look at time stamps. You can just sort by metadata (camera model, etc) and change the times just for those series of photos.
The best part about this is that you can do this at any point throughout the day, even with shooters who show up later than the rest of the crew, etc. You don’t have to all be together at the exact same time. Cool, huh?
Ideally you’d all be synced to the same time source, but that’s not always practical, so hopefully this makes it a bit easier on you.
- Published: 11.15.09 / 10am
- Category: Photo Tips/Tricks
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