In a nutshell:

I'm regularly dealing with 5-8 cam shoots.  The cams are small-form, currently DVX-100As, possibly upping to HVRZ7Us.  I've yet to find a camera that satisfies the needs of the production team that also has a TC input. 

The "flash" trick doesn't always work- not all cameras can see the same areas, and they don't always catch the flash.  Stopping things so they focus on the flash is ruining the performance's energy and frustrating the performers, so that needs to go.

The Audio engineer and I have concocted a plan, though, but I don't know if it will work:  Transmit SMPTE to Audio Ch 1 via wireless to all cams. (audio is separately multi-track recorded and worked on in Nuendo - which poses its own problems for another thread).

Buuuut... while that would give me a syncable source, I don't know of any way to get Avid to "see" that SMTPE if only just to sync it to the other SMTPE audio tracks of the other cameras.

Anyone know of a plug-in or work flow that allows Avid to read that Chanel 1 recorded SMTPE code on DV/HDV tapes?

steve maio:

I don't know of any way to get Avid to "see" that SMTPE if only just to sync it to the other SMTPE audio tracks of the other cameras.

Sure you can. Just capture that audio track and, under the special menu choose "read Audio Timecode".

I should have guessed it would be hidden away in there somewhere.

For some strange reason I thought this option was limited to analogue sources!