“I’m doing a project where I will be recording multitrack audio on a Digi001 and digital video on a camera at the same time. I want to be sure they are synced so I can work with them later. What’s the best way to do this?”
The good news is you are thinking of this question BEFORE you actually capture the performance. Many clients come to us after the damage has been done. You can still sync it up later, but it’s not as easy. There are several ways to accomplish this. One of the easiest is to use the video frame rate of the camera to drive the audio sampling clock of the audio recorder. This can be done by using a synchronizer such as Mark of the Unicorn’s Digital Time Piece (DTP). The DTP will take a composite video signal (from your camera) and derive resolved word clock from the video frame rate. Record your project with the Digi001 synced to this external clock. This will ensure that your audio recording is resolved to the speed of the video recording.
What it will NOT do is provide location information for the audio to “chase” the video later. But you really don’t need that to get them synchronized. You can slide audio tracks around in your software to accomplish this as needed. It’s easiest if you have someone clap their hands or something prior to beginning the performance. This will give you a distinct visual and audio event to work with. You’ll just make the audio line up with the picture at the end. Everything should stay in sync just fine so long as the recording was done referenced to that external clock. The important concept here is that the recording rate or speed was the same on both the audio and video machines. Thus, when they start in sync later they will stay in sync so long as the playback rate is synced. If the record rate of one machine is different than the other it becomes much more difficult to make them sync later.
Once you have finished the recording you can then work with the audio offline, or not synced to the camera. Then just sync the clocks back together when you are ready to dub or layback the audio into the video. Even if you also take the video off-line and edit it you will still be fine in the end because you know the original material is all resolved to itself.