Synching with a 7D in FCP--confusing!

[srmarx]

I am editing a feature shot with 7Ds using Final Cut Pro 6. They used a timecode slate, but it wasn't sync jammed to the recorder.
The 7Ds were recording sound, too. The h264 footage was converted to ProRes.
When I watch the footage, the click sound is about 2 frames ahead of when the slate is visually closed, and it's about 6 frames ahead of when the slate numbers turn to 000000.
I've been synching on the click sound from the 7D, and this seems to work, but this begs several questions:
1) what if the cameras didn't record sound? What would I do to sync it?
2) what if this had been shot on film and telecined into video? Same question.

Also, synching 1200 clips is pretty slow because the file numbers of the camera cards are in computerese and bare no resemblance to scene numbers. In other words, all the audio and video clips have to be logged before I can sync them.
Is there an easier way to do this with a program that could match the times the audio and video files are generated?

 

[Alex H.]

Canon EOS cameras are known to have sync issues... even the in-camera audio is a couple frames off from the video (see THIS recent thread). Without TC jammed to the recorder, there's really no reason to have a TC slate. Your best option, and the one that will get you in sync, is to match the spike in the waveform of the production audio with the frame of video where the sticks come together.

In the old days of the "talkies", there was no sound recorded to film (in fact, that's still common practice). The sync point in that case is the same as above: the frame of film where the sticks come together, matched with the clap in the audio. Telecine won't matter, because audio is not dependent on frame rate. 1:30 of audio is 1:30 of audio, whether it's dropped into a 23.976 time line or a 29.97 time line. What matters there is the sample rate (which should be 48kHz).

Not sure which audio recorder you used... mine can be set to name files for scene/take. I have to manually reset the file name when there's a scene change, but it changes the take number after each stop. This makes things much easier in post. You can try Pluraleyes... I don't use it, so I'm not sure what the batch-processing capabilities are, but it's an oft-used program for automatically syncing non-sync audio and video.

 

[srmarx]

Thanks for the advice

Thanks for the advice

Pluraleyes works by synching the camera audio and recorder audio--the way I've been doing it--so it'll be 2 frames off, too.
What's the meaning of the timecode slate going to 00:00:00:00 ? Is that the point when the sticks have come together?

Canon EOS cameras are known to have sync issues... even the in-camera audio is a couple frames off from the video (see THIS recent thread). Without TC jammed to the recorder, there's really no reason to have a TC slate. Your best option, and the one that will get you in sync, is to match the spike in the waveform of the production audio with the frame of video where the sticks come together.

In the old days of the "talkies", there was no sound recorded to film (in fact, that's still common practice). The sync point in that case is the same as above: the frame of film where the sticks come together, matched with the clap in the audio. Telecine won't matter, because audio is not dependent on frame rate. 1:30 of audio is 1:30 of audio, whether it's dropped into a 23.976 time line or a 29.97 time line. What matters there is the sample rate (which should be 48kHz).

Not sure which audio recorder you used... mine can be set to name files for scene/take. I have to manually reset the file name when there's a scene change, but it changes the take number after each stop. This makes things much easier in post. You can try Pluraleyes... I don't use it, so I'm not sure what the batch-processing capabilities are, but it's an oft-used program for automatically syncing non-sync audio and video.