Blackmagic Forum

I currently use two Ninja V with sync units on my GH5 and GH5S. They work great. When I start the master the other starts in sync. Both have calibrations for HDMI delay from the GH5's. Since the GH5S will soon have the ability to record BRAW to a Video Assist 12G it would be nice to integrate into the same sync system. From what I can see there is no sync capability on the Video Assist models a big omission on professional units I think. Strange since the Pocket cameras all have a sync capability.

timecode being audio, it could be embedded on one of the audio channels, either on sdi or hdmi

The Video Assist models can accept timecode that is embedded in either the SDI or HDMI video signals (SMPTE RP188 timecode). The 7-inch Video Assist models also have an option to use the XLR audio input as an external timecode source for LTC timecode (this was added in firmware version 3.3).

I think that the reason the 5-inch Video Assist models lack this option is that they don't have any external audio input jack (and LTC timecode is essentially an audio signal). Perhaps they could do something with the USB-C port (for example, if they enabled support for a USB-C audio adapter), but at the moment I think that port can only be used for USB-C drives for recording or for the USB webcam output feature.

I suppose you could record the timecode as an audio track on the 5-inch models, but you'd have to feed this into the camera's audio input since there is no audio input on the 5-inch Video Assist. And not all video editing software supports reading LTC timecode from audio tracks yet (Resolve does, but Premiere still does not).

But at least with the 7-inch Video Assist model anyway, you could use something like the Timecode Systems UltraSync One to feed wirelessly sync'ed timecode into the Video Assist's XLR input, and it would properly mark the recordings with that timecode without needing to record it as an audio track.

Some kind of audio delay offset is definitely a missing feature on the Video Assist line though. This would probably be most useful on the 7-inch models that have an external audio input (since if the embedded audio from the HDMI or SDI inputs were used, you'd kind of expect it to be in sync already). Considering that a lot of cameras have various amounts of video output delay, it would be nice to have some way to get the recorded audio and video to match up if you are feeding external audio to the Video Assist.

If you are using a separate timecode-enabled external audio recorder and feeding the same timecode to the Video Assist, then this might be less of an issue, as the timecode could be used to match up the audio.

Can you run timecode into the SDI while simultaneously using the HDMI for video on the 12g VA 5.5"?