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Anyone used a Lockit Buddy?
  • B3GuyB3Guy

    Hey, everyone! The rental house where I am interning just picked up a "Lockit Buddy", and I was just wondering if anyone else is using these or is aware of their capabilities. Its basically a small box that takes in timecode and sends that to your camera's audio track, essentially enabling proper dual-system timecode synched audio on DSLR type cameras that otherwise would not have timecode. OF course you must edit in a software that supports audio timecode, but the site lists Avid and FCP both as software that have this ability. I'll be testing this nifty little thing out in the near future, so I'll re port back when I've used it ia bit more, but I just thought it sounded like something very useful.

    http://www.lockitbuddy.com/website/index.html

  • 2 Replies sorted by
  • mrbillmrbill

    You'd use the 'auxilliary timecode' option in avid for this. Never tried it on a dslr, but it works on camcorders

  • DirkVoorhoeveDirkVoorhoeve

    I've used the TC on the audio track method several times before there was DualEyes or PluralEyes.

    It might be great if you already have an external recorder that records timecode to the files and has TC out. But to be wire-free you'll want a lock-it ($1000) to be jam-synced every few hours with the (time of day) TC of the sound-recorder. You can even set the User Bit to a date + sound-disk/tape number and you're sure of a great way to sync all your files. You might want to try http://www.movie-slate.com/ instead of the LockIt if you need to save yourself a lot of money.

    Is worth the hassle and investment, now we have DualEyes or PluralEyes? I would say: no, as it also introduces a lot of new problems (forgetting to jam, tc offsets etc).

    But in some rare cases it might be the perfect solution, for instance if you can't use a cable from mixer to camera, transmitters are not allowed and sound levels are too high to use the internal cameramic for synchronization.

    btw: thanks to all of the work of @thepalalias you can manually set your input levels, so I am pretty sure you can feed the TC out of your sound-recorder or lock-it directly to the camera input, without this Lockit Buddy, saving yourself another $ 130.

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