TL;DR

This is a FLOSS hardware dongle + software combo to:

  • sync camera video with sound from a dedicated audio recorder
  • sync multiple camera takes and show them aligned on your timeline

The merging of video with synced audio is done with the accompanying software before importing into your video editor. Yes, other well established solutions exist but this one is cheaper (45$ for each synced device VS 150$) and simpler on many aspects.

TicTacSync: syncing for the (DIY) masses

This is a cheap hardware/software combo to aid in automatically syncing audio and video you’re shooting. The post-production software can sync multicam too. It will appeal to videographers who have encountered some limitations of their editing software “waveform analysis syncing” and should also interest scientists who need to timestamp data recordings within sub-millisecond precision.

Distribution of pre-flashed kits on tindie is planed. A GUI application is considered for non-dev users (a lot of videographers don’t know hot to pip install ).

Want to sync dual-system sound without breaking the bank? Doing multicam? Multisound? Need clock drift correction? tictacsync does it all!

  • TicTacCode is a new audio timing track format to timestamp both the start and the end of a recording. It is not SMPTE LTC and does not identifies individual frames (hence by design it is framerate agnostic).

  • TicTacSync (note the case) is the hardware dongle generating TicTacCode. It fetches UTC time from GNSS signals. You need one for each recording device if your use case is syncing media files. Low cost, less than 45 USD, it is assembled from off the shelve components . Here’s a sample BOM on Adafruit store. photo

  • For syncing media files, tictacsync is the postproduction CLI program that processes recordings shot with the dongle(s), see repo. This program does the syncing before putting your clips into your NLE of choice (see demo on the left). As an addded bonus it does time stretching to correct excessive clock drift between your devices, if any (see code).