I know people have had some issues with sync but I've never run into them in my limited experience with the first generation H4. I suspect they show up most when you're recording long events, etc - but considering the 5D can only record 12 minutes at a time I don't expect sync will be much of an issue.

Also the workflow I see myself using with this combo is to run the output from the zoom into the input on the camera, in essence using it like the beachtek adapter, but with higher quality backup recording that I can use in situations where the in camera track doesn't come out the way I'd like.

The 'Cheap Time Chip' or the 'Sync' problem is quite common to most (if not 90%+) digital recorders (just made that number up, but alot of them arent exactly sync with the video. It kinda drifts by a second over a 20min video clip, for my olympus recorder.

Its really easy to 'stretch or shrink' the audio from the recorder to match the video. I do it just by looking at peaks, takes less than 1 min to do if you understand what im talking about.

I have to disagree about the 'wandering clock frequency', for a 20min clip, once i sync it, it stays synced.
Maybe if you are recording for a straight 1hr, it might 'wander', but that shouldnt be a problem since no one records for a straight hour...

Cant wait to get my 5D mkII with a zoom h4 (or h4n)!!

1) make the whole thing a giant grip. Not necessarily the shutter/AE controls (not shooting videos in portrait anyway)

2) built in SD or CF audio recording (nothing fancy, just build in the functionality of a 3 year old iRiver for redundant recording)

Or some way to plug in/mount one of the Zoom uniits.


3) maybe provide Power to the camera since its blocking the battery slot.

love the LCD though

Which would be just so much cooler if the variable brightness of the display could be saved as a special setting and used like one of those lighted lens caps to force the camera to preset settings.

-MD

Just a quick comment...

Sync and drift between video and an external audio recorder (that are not physically synced or jammed) have NOTHING to do with "cheap" or "expensive" or "consumer" or "pro."

You could take an absolutely killer pro audio recorder (say a 744t), run it at 24/48 or 16/48 (in a non timecode sync just stand alone mode), and if you manually sync that with your head of your video clip, if you have a long enough clip it will likely drift significantly (say over an hour). This is pretty normal and is expected no matter what recorder you are using.

If you don't have the luxury of jamming TC, like you can't with the 5D2, there is an easy fix for extended clips (although with a 12 min. max, this may never happen), just slate the tail of the clip in addition to the head. Then sync the head with the head slate, and stretch/compress the audio clip until the tail slate is also synced.

Just saw the latest Beachtek ad on the Digital Journalist site. It looks larger than I imagined.

Dan

That looks super clunky...

On the other hand, XLRs are a thing of beauty, audio-wise. :)

What is the difference between the Zoom H4 and the Zoom H4n? Is the old model no good for sound recording?

somebody needs to make a beachtek style adapter that will hold the zoom recorder in it AND have rails for a matte box and hedon zoom motor plus small power supply

yeah, it should be a grip!! ugh.

Yeah, right up until the point you pad the signal and run it mini-jack style into a crappy preamp and A/D with AGC no less.

Touché! :)

On the upside it looks like a good place to sit your production notes and spare lenses.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't get what makes this special for the 5D2. I've got a couple of Sound Devices MixPres that are rugged, small, great preamps with pan, slate, headphone amp, meters, XLR ins and outs and a minijack tape out that feeds the 5D perfectly. What makes this a 5DII development?

My understanding is that the big difference here is that it can mostly overcome the issues with the 5dmk2's automatic gain. by mixing an inaudible tone into one or both of the output channels. perhaps it even gives you levels before the tone. you could do this with your mixpre, but youd need to add another device to generate the tone, and of course then you have to be careful about the calibration and monitoring of that tone and of the other sources which might be made more difficult by using an external tone generator. I am attempting to accomplish the same thing with an inexpensive 3channel field mixer (needs that extra 3rd channel for the tone generator). Of course editors will have trouble with this since it will likely mess with their ability to monitor levels or normalize audio unless they isolate and remove the tone from the channel(s).