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We are trying to sync 23 cameras and 4 strobe lights together. However, we keep getting a black band rolling across the images and can not figure out how to sync the strobes to fire when all of the shutters are fully open.

We have 23 Canon Rebel T5's all synced up to one wired trigger. It's a multi-trigger all plugging into the remote release.

The master camera has a SpeedLight 600EX-RT attached to it triggering 4 Einsteins strobe lights running via an optical slave. The flash is set to fire on the master camera at the second curtain.

The master camera is shooting at 1/30 and the other cameras are running at 1/15.

Any suggestions to try?

Hardware:

  • 23 x Canon Rebel T5
  • 4 x Einstein 640 Strobe Lights
  • 1 x Canon SpeedLight 600EX-RT
  • 1 Single to Multiple Camera Wired Trigger
  • Breeze Multicamera Pro System for pulling images from cameras via USB

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    2 Answers 2

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    Are you triggering via USB or just pulling the images via USB? From the BreezeSys website:

    How accurately can the cameras be synchronized?

    For best results the cameras should be set to manual focus and triggered via the remote release sockets. The figures below are for guidance purposes only. Please see this page for more information.

    Triggering still photos via USB: The cameras will fire one after the other with a delay of approximately 1/6th sec between each camera e.g. with 4 cameras camera #2 will fire approximately 1/6th sec after camera #1, camera #3 will fire approximately 1/3rd sec after camera #1 and camera #4 will fire approximately 1/2th sec after camera #1

    Triggering still photos via the remote release socket: The cameras all fire at the same time within the tolerances of their shutter lag. If all the cameras are of the same model they will typically all fire within 1ms of each other however occasionally a camera will have a longer shutter lag and may be out of sync with the other cameras by several milliseconds. The synchronization tends to be more consistent if mirror lockup is used.

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    • \$\begingroup\$ I'm just pulling images via USB. I'm using a multi-trigger hardware system that's wired to each camera's remote release. \$\endgroup\$
      – coderdave
      Jun 12, 2015 at 17:38
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    We were able to get it working by dropping the shutter speed to 1/2 second for all the slave cameras and 1/4 for the master camera. The strobes are at 1/1000.

    This worked perfectly and it seemed like whatever the variability of the camera's shutter speed was too much for 1/60, 1/30 or 1/15.

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