Micro Studio Camera genlock questions

Hi all,

I have rather odd use case for the Micro Studio Camera, where genlock would come in handy. I'm using the camera to film (rescan) an old Sony PVM CRT monitor displaying 576i50 content (for video art purposes, hence the weird setup). Obviously, this yields some interesting sync challenges – there are some sweet spots with certain combinations of exposure time and frame rate settings that work well with little flicker and no black bars in the image – but to make it more stable, I would like to try to genlock the camera to the source that is feeding the monitor (which is an analog video synthesizer, if that matters).

Apparently the camera does support blackburst (bi-level) sync, which is what I can get from the video synthesizer, but connecting it does not make any apparent visible difference. This yields a couple of questions:

1) Should the MSC be able to genlock to an SD sync signal? Does it matter which format I set it to? Does it need to be i50 to lock to 576i50, or could p50 or even p25 work as well?

2) Does the camera in any way indicate if it's receiving a valid sync signal? If so, how?

The Genlock is an analog “Black Burst” (or a Tri-Color for HD) pulse signal to sync the camera to a host device, like a video switcher in multi-cam setups. The Micro Studio does Genlock to a SD signal, but the frsme rste should match, 576i50, or both set a 50HZ. There is no in camera indication of sync lock, it just sets the camera to sync with the input source.
Cheers

[Gary Adams]

Denny is correct. Make sure the frame rate of the reference matches the frame rate of the camera. If the camera does lock you would see a glitch in the video about a second after connecting. Worth a try. Also note the camera needs analog composite black with Burst. It will not work with just sync only. And it probably won’t work with Composite with a video image. That said you might need to have the shutter on the camera set very low to catch the CRT scan. That might help the most.

Regards. Gary

This reminds me of the movie Poltergeist