Is there a way to get Alienbees to rear curtain sync for action shots?

PW Multimax is the only way AFAIK.

The AlienBee factor here is insignifigant as it is a 'dumb' unit that fires when your trigger signal says so. So you need to have your trigger signal provide the rear curtain.

I am pretty sure Nikon provides rear curtain through the sync port when the camera is set to rear, but Canon only puts out a first curtain sync no matter the camera setting

The PW MultiMax can 'create' one, you tell it a delay and it creates the rear curtain by delaying the initial pulse it gets from sync.

someone with some electronics experience could create a delay box that could work too, but that would be a tinker type project that would need to be tuned, so it would not really work for fast action.

my Canon bodies allow me to set the rear curtain sync on the body, this means that the camera will fire (any flash unit) at the tail end of the shutter fire
... this is great for 30s exposures of models at night & such

NinaS wrote:
my Canon bodies allow me to set the rear curtain sync on the body, this means that the camera will fire (any flash unit) at the tail end of the shutter fire
... this is great for 30s exposures of models at night & such

AFAIK, that's only for speedlights.

Why not put a speedlight on camera and let the ABs trigger optically from it? Not an ideal thing but should work.

b/c the optical triggers on AB's are terrible. If you have a modifier on the AB, and its facing you...it drastically reduces the effectiveness of the optical trip.

NinaS wrote:
my Canon bodies allow me to set the rear curtain sync on the body, this means that the camera will fire (any flash unit) at the tail end of the shutter fire
... this is great for 30s exposures of models at night & such

That only works for Canon-dedicated flash units.