I am starting to do 2-3 camera shoots. And I discovering getting everything in sync can be harder than expected. Do some people start and stop rolling at the same time? Or just slate it. Any advice would help.

A slate is very easy to sync too, so slate if you can.
If you can't, then try syncing to a camera flash. Bring a camera along.

Slate and flash are the best ways to sync, however if your takes are very long (20+ min of straight rolling tape), you might find that different cameras have slightly different tape speeds and thing get a little off. If you can edit around it, another camera flash will help. If not, try lining up audio tracks and or identifible movements in all cameras such as a foot hitting the floor, character scratching nose etc. More modern/more expensive cameras might not have too much problem with this.

Let me tell ya, it's better to just roll roll roll. During shoots, especially weddings, I have the coordinator tell me 3 minutes before the wedding starts, so I can run from cam to cam to start the roll.

Audio is a great way to find the sync, sometimes I'll look for peaks in the audio, such as feedback because the freakin sound man doesn't know what he's doing! Ok, I'm calm again.

A camera flash is really a good tip, much better than me slapping my hands together and saying 'Rollem.'

Yeah i tend to use a mixture of those.. 2 / 3 cameras doing live gigs, i'll use audio peaks to get them roughly in line, then use headphones and adjust volumes until i can hear if they're slightly out of sync and nudge em a frame here and there. Movements are always useful, but if the cameras are pointing in different directions thats not always possible (or if you're syncing to an audio only track of course!)

Stagger your tape changes 3-5 minutes. This can be done by either staggering when your cameras begin rolling, or by prerolling tapes 0 min on camera A, 5 min on camera B, 10 min on Camera C. All the tapes that follow don't need to be prerolled, just the first one, to "set" the time of the tape change for each camera.

Also headsets for communication between cameras is very helpful. This way when people are making tape changes and battery changes, everyone knows and that camera can be covered during theose few minutes. Create a plan on who is covering what and what canmeras will be wide, or tight, etc.

Keep your voices low and keep the chatter clean and to a minimum, you never know who's listening.

A buddy of mine has a whole bunch of Radio Shack intercoms that seem to work fine, but there are other better, more expensive ones too. In a pinch cell phones work. Be sure everyone's phone is on vibrate. But this may interfere with the audio.

I am working on band video at the moment. I usually use the drum major salute to find a synch and then tune it on an audio peak.

That's way more fun than a slate!

Paul...

For what it's worth, we do multicamera shoots and just have the on-camera talent give us a single hand clap.

Works like a charm everytime.

Stagger your tape changes 3-5 minutes. This can be done by either staggering when your cameras begin rolling, or by prerolling tapes 0 min on camera A, 5 min on camera B, 10 min on Camera C. All the tapes that follow don't need to be prerolled, just the first one, to "set" the time of the tape change for each camera.


That's one of the best recommendations I've read yet.

Simple and effective !