What alternative for Sync I/O?

[Studiomeijer]

What kind of synchroniser should I buy for my HD sytem. I like the Sync I/O, but is there a cheaper solution? I would like to sync to a Beta sp and/ or a digibeta. Thanks!

[Noiz2]

Well you can use a MOTU Digital Timepiece, or even a Midi Time Piece AV or even poss a VSD & SSD combo or the USD. Depends on what OS your using what version of PT and what you need from them etc. and of course how adventuresome you are. Some of the above need a serial port. MOTU will work under OSX (I'm using them), I'm not sure about the Digi boxes.

[Tiago Silva]

Since both your decks have LTC, you need a LTC to MTC converter. All the above mentioned should work great; I'll add that if you need to do pull-downs and pull-ups you'll need something like a Rosendahl WIF. Then you need a MIDI interface, and those are readily available with USB ports (Midiman USBPort 2x2).

However, in another discussion someone from Digidesign remarked that the whole point of the USD and/or the Sync interfaces was to make sure that the frame edges of the video deck and the ProTools timeline matched to within samples of each other. He said that the LTC to MTC option could be wrong for almost a frame's lenght, in a worst case.

First time I had heard anything like it, anyway. I am used to punch in and out of Betas (on the beta's edit controller) with the ProTools following the timecode and have never noticed a jump.