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March 26, 2021
SYNCHRONIZATION
Precise synchronization between show systems, especially those involving ride vehicles, is one of the biggest
challenges faced in themed entertainment applications. Doing this properly involves achieving two critical
conditions:
1.
Phase-locked Clocks
–
All clocks m
ust operate at the same rate to avoid ‘drifting’ from one another
2.
Precise Triggering
- All systems must start playback simultaneously with extreme precision
The unique design of the SyncCore technology integrated into RidePlayer, V16X, and BinloopX enables these
products to easily achieve both conditions and ensure precise synchronization between all on-board and off-board
show systems throughout the entire attraction.
PHASE-LOCKED CLOCKS
Let’s say you and a friend buy identical wristwatches and set both
to the exact same time. When you meet up
again a week later, you might be surprised to see that the watches are likely many seconds off from one another.
Why? Well, there are many contributing factors such as crystal frequency precision, temperature, mechanical
tolerance, etc. Bottom line… the watches run at slightly different rates and this difference compounds over time.
The same concept also holds true with the audio and video clocks used as the basis for AV playback. Without a
shared reference clock, all AV components will play at slightly different rates and drift from one another over time.
The solution to this problem is to phase-lock these clocks with each other. This generally involves one piece of
equipment serving as the clock ‘master’ and distributing its clock to other ‘slave’ devices. The ‘slave’ devices then
speed up or slow down t
heir clocks to stay in perfect time with the ‘master’ device.
SyncCore allows AV clocks to be phase-locked by any of the following methods:
•
PTP (IEEE-1588)
•
NTP
•
GPS
•
SMPTE LTC
•
Genlock
