- Yo, yo, Josh Yeo.
We are up here in Whistler, Canada,
and we're doin a little quick episode on timecode
and how you can get your little mirror-less camera
bangin out some timecode.
And you guys can compete with $15,000 production cameras.
Kind of.
You guys have probably heard of it,
you probably don't really know what it is.
Maybe you do know what it is.
Maybe you have a Cannon C300 Mark II
and you're like, this guy's a moron.
I am a moron.
Let's jump into it.
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How do you explain timecode?
All right, so you have a six-person shoot.
It's a wedding or it's a sporting event.
You have six cameras,
they're all pointing at different angles
and you could sync them up each time manually
with a slate
or you could just marry their timecode
and sync 'em up once.
The other use for timecode is you book a big job,
network television
and they're like, great, bring your camera
and make sure you have timecode on it.
♪ What is timecode? Ahhh. Pft. ♪
And your head explodes.
See that running clock?
This is what timecode is.
Broken down by hours, minutes, seconds, and frames.
That runs itself on your camera
and embeds it into the metadata.
I don't want to be explaining timecode.
You know what? No.
I'm excited.
Timecode is super rad
because nobody really knows about it,
but if you can use it,
you can get some much better paying jobs
like network television jobs.
Because all of their cameras run timecode.
Generally, a sound guy is gonna have timecode.
They'll have it on their little mixer board
and they'll be blasting it out
and you'll never even know it.
The reason why network television uses
is because the writers will ask
or the interviews or whatever they're recording
to be transcribed.
Read through the text, circle the good parts,
and have an exact timecode
so they can pass that along to the editors.
It's a complete way to streamline
your whole editing process.
And it's been around for years.
You guys get what timecode is, right?
Most Prosumer cameras are gonna have timecode.
Even my little Sony action cameras have timecode.
Super easy to use
so let's jump right in there.
Sync 'em all up.
All right, so let's go to menu.
Let's go to little briefcase thing,
I don't know what that's called.
On the Sony a7R III it's under the third menu setting.
timecode UB settings.
Okay, so first up let's change this over to timecode.
Next, timecode Preset.
This is what you want your time of day to be.
So you would essentially marry all of your cameras
with the same number.
UB Preset, UB Preset is basically a way
that you can number your cameras,
you can install more information in the metadata.
So you could say this is camera one,
that's camera two, that's camera three,
or whatever.
I don't use it,
but I suppose if you're working on a documentary
and you needed all this information
that's what UB Preset is for.
It's user bit data.
All right, let's get the fuck out of this menu.
So if you're shooting at 23 or 24
you're not gonna have this option of DF or NDF.
DF stands for drop frame.
NDF stands for non-drop frame.
If you're shooting network television,
you're gonna be shooting at 29 drop frame.
Next, let's go to timecode Run.
You want it on Free Run.
Now, there's actually two batteries in the camera.
You have the regular battery
and then you have the clock battery in there.
timecode is gonna be running on your clock battery.
So if you swap batteries,
timecode doesn't need to be reset.
It'll continue running.
Next, timecode Make.
You want this on Preset.
UB record time. That is off.
Unless of course, you're using user bits, which I don't use.
So you're doing this live event.
You have four videographers
all shooting different directions.
What you can do,
you can manually preset adjust the clock to your time of day
and then hit enter at the same time when you go
to sync it up in post,
ya line 'em up by timecode in your timeline.
You just move 'em over how ever many frames or seconds
until they're all on and then you can multi-cam edit.
Dave Dugdale did an episode
where he had a little Sony remote
where you could hit enter on both of them.
so that's one workaround.
He still said that it was off by a frame anyways
so you'd have to sync it up later.
There is an alternative way to have timecode on your camera
and that's by adding one of these little guys right here,
which is a NanoLockit.
In a nutshell, these are like five or six hundred dollars
for a set of these.
They plug into the camera and you can jam sync that way.
If that sounds interesting to you guys,
I'll do an episode on that.
Phew.
All right, wasn't that hard.
If you can master timecode,
you can get bigger production jobs.
You can be a more rounded filmmaker or a commercial shooter
or wedding videographer if you have that figured out.
If you get a bigger job with the sound guy,
you're gonna need to know what timecode is.
So you might as well take that plunge now,
unlock that menu in your camera and get to work.
Anyway, this is Josh Yeo saying thank you very much.
Stay creative, now go unlock some timecode.
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