Least worst drift in portable recorders?

[Bob Hart]

You would have enjoyed using a clockwork Bolex, carefully adjusted to a 50i TV screen whilst pulling junk film, working with a Sony TCD10 Pro II and holding sync for about 20 seconds.

The Nagra IV.2 and CP16R were good for one frame or less in 8 minutes.

If you haven't had to pull in a 1 in 44 frame sound stretch which occurred with an old UHER1000 Report Pilot after a shakeup on a rough road had reset the speed, you have not lived.

[Warren Kawamoto]

Originally Posted by Mark Morreau

I have a Zoom H4 (original version) which suffers badly from audio drift when used in conjunction with my video cameras, (Sony EX1s and Z5s), all of which keep perfect time with each other.
Mark

Mark, can the H4 record 48Khz wav? Were you recording wav or mp3? I'm asking because I have the Sony Ex1 and H4n, and when I set the H4n to wav at 48Khz, drift is less than 1 frame over a period of 1 hour. I'm editing on Edius 6. I never record mp3, it'll always go out of sync. The holy grail, then, is to record .wav at 48Khz.

[Jon Fairhurst]

Back when I worked at Grass Valley Group in the late 80s and early 90s, we made a Reference Master Sync Pulse Generator with a temperature-controlled crystal oscillator. This was intended as a master clock in a studio or broadcast head end. You would then send color black from it to slave SPGs distributed throughout the building.

The oscillator was about the size of a tennis ball, but in the shape of a cube. It had a thermostat and an oven in a sealed metal case. And, no, it wasn't cheap!

And if you had two stations, each with it's own reference SPG, the two buildings would still drift and need a frame synchronizer for live feeds.

It would be nice to have genlock or equivalent on budget AV production gear. It beats carrying around a couple of oven-encased crystals!

One concern with any sync test is that they can vary unit to unit and in different temperature and humidity situations. Not to dis the test though. It's about as good as we can do without calibrated clocks or genlock.

[Mark Morreau]

Originally Posted by Warren Kawamoto

Mark, can the H4 record 48Khz wav? Were you recording wav or mp3? I'm asking because I have the Sony Ex1 and H4n, and when I set the H4n to wav at 48Khz, drift is less than 1 frame over a period of 1 hour. I'm editing on Edius 6. I never record mp3, it'll always go out of sync. The holy grail, then, is to record .wav at 48Khz.

Yes, the H4 can, and I did, record at 48Khz .wav. Glad to hear the H4n is better at keeping sync. Personally, I didn't want to get another Zoom product.
Compared to the Roland R-26 the H4 now feels like a plasticy complicated POS, destined for eBay.

But to be less snarky, it's great that the current generation of these pocket recorders seem very good at keeping strict time. That'll be modern microelectronics for ya.