Planned work flow for shooting and post-production (a video syncing primer)

Equipment

• A video camera (ideally with a jack for sound input)
• A stereo sound recorder (good ones start at around 100$, here's a list: 10 portable recorders for 2014 )
• A well placed mic (the nearer, the better). For short budgets and spoken voice,  Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Microphones are a good start (and cheap at 30$!)
• Two different Linear Time Code generators (Atomic Synchonators I'm designing here).

Shooting 

The principle of operation of LTC syncing is that you're continuously tagging your video track with a signal where time is encoded (to the 1/30 of sec for ex.). For this you need to sacrifice an audio track on your video recorder: this track will be dedicated to the LTC signal (remember, LTC is a digital signal in the audio band: you can ear it and record it on an audio track, it has been designed for this very use, you can listen to a sample here ). Same thing for your sound recorder: a track must be dedicated to the LTC signal.

The setup:

As long as the 2 LTC generators are kept in sync (and so produce simultaneously the same time code) the camera and the recorder can operate free from each other without cables running between them. NB: all this post covers setups for consumer (and prosumer) level equipement... 80 000 $ cameras don't need all this, they got SMPTE time code functions (and INs and OUTs) built in. And 2000$ field recorders too.

Post-production

Back in post prod, the video file and the sound file can be joined together with software that  precisely compare and aligns the TLC track on the video and the TLC track on the recorder:

The LTC track may be kept in the merged video file if it's a multi cameras shooting (and recorders). The script will wrap ffmpeg and ltcdump from ltctools .