On the face of it putting the cylinder system on the same drive as the
Nipkow disc seems the way to go to get synchronisation on recording and playback.
But there is a big problem in doing this I think....
Even if the cylinder each time is keyed to the cylinder mandrel, because the recording/playback head is placed gently by hand onto the cylinder surface, as is normal for cylinder machines, there is no correlation then between the line/frame information on the cylinder and with the Nipkow disc postion.
I therefore think that a seperate drive and machine be used with what I would call a 'rotary adjusting sync wheel' as my rough sketch shows.
It would be about a 4 inch dia wheel driven at 750 RPM with the 31 sync holes around its outer circumference, (like the present Nipkow.) The new idea though is to have the opto fork on a rotating arm which can be swung around in order to send sync pulses correctly aligned with the picture information coming from the cylinder. A small adjusting knob at the end of the shaft would enable this.
Each time the reproducing head is placed upon the start of a cylinder a new sync adjustment will be required by moving the opto around once again (because each time the reproducer/recorder is place upon a cylinder it is always in a different relative radial position to the cylinder and to the start of line/frame picture information.)
.....this might be all part of the novelty in using a cylinder system.
Another advantage of seperating the drives would be that existing NBTVs could easily be adapted to use the cylinder system by just adding 2 external phono plugs. One for the picture information from the new cylinder machine and the other the sync pulses from the new rotary sync wheel on it which could be taken straight to the motor control 4046 IC cct., so bypassing any normal sync seperator.
Added later........
If standard sync pulses where to be modified to have a longer pulse length these could then be recorded directly onto wax, but this looses some picture info.
Albert.