Crystal Motors and Wild Cameras

[Timothy David Orme]

I'm shooting a film coming up soon and I need some immediate help. Bascially, I'm trying to determine whether or not shooting with a camera that's not ran by a crystal motor is going to affect the sync sound enough to make me worry. I've heard from a few sources it might be, but I thought I'd ask the more knowledgable people on this message board.

 

Thanks.

[Guest]

Ahhhh, YES, just slightly!

 

You won't be able to do any meaningful dialogue without a crystal synch motor on the camera. If you use a wild camera motor your audio will drift out very quickly, maybe you'll get 4-6 seconds on a good day.

 

So yes it will make you worry. There are those on this board who have elaborate work arounds for doing sound with a non-synch motor, but it is in no way worth the trouble.

 

The other question is the noise level that comes from a wild camera, they are not designed for sound so even if you have a synch motor, without a blimp they will be useless for audio.

 

The Konvas 1M and 2M have a good synch motor, and there are a couple of synch motors available for the Arri 2C, but they are both very loud. So even though they would stay in synch, blimping them is a real issue.

 

You'll have to rent a silent synch sound camera or buy a used one on ebay perhaps. If you're shooting 16mm there are several older Arri models that pop up on ebay.

 

R,