Workflow for classical music recording session / edit, on a tightish budget

[ullanta]

Alan beat me to it but Pluraleyes was going to be my suggestion. It was designed to sync multiple cameras based on their audio tracks. So if you make your cut audio the master then you should with some effort get the clips to sync to it.

The catch is that with so many edits it could get dicey. But if you just use it on the critical clips where you have a close up then it might not be so bad.

Working "backward" you will always have the problem of NLE's only working at the frame level, but you should be able to get better than 1/2 frame sync. The only way to get dead on sync is to cut the sound to match the picture not visa versa. I know that isn't an option but you might point that out to them - it's not a skill issue it's a media issue, you can't cut picture any tighter than a full frame so you can get a half frame from sync but any closer is a crap shoot.

Howdy, Noiz! Actually, subframe precision of the sync is rarely an issue, and just because of the camera distance differences and such, this is usually hand-adjusted to "look right" on a shot-by-shot basis. But having PluralEyes match things might be a time-saver. But, in your experience, would PluralEyes work well:

1. When the final mix is pretty different (in a mix sense) from the camera feed?
2. In matching alternate takes of the same section of music?
3. In matching when some additional material is thrown into the mix (e.g., a track of electronic accompaniment [a somewhat frequent case for me - many of the people I work with focus on avant-gardish stuff that has an electronic playback component, or an interactive electronic component (e.g., a MAX patch)])? If not, I suppose I could export a mix without the extra material, then later replace it with the final mix... maybe ignore this question...!
4. Will PluralEyes match a video clip (multiple copies of a video clip) to different sections of the audio? How would it handle a long video clip with many takes that matche different parts of the edited audio? Or would I pretty much need to chop the video into the takes? And even then, would I need to make a separate copy of each take for each time any part of it is used in the edit?

Sorry for the barrage!

 

[Alan H. Chang]

PluralEyes would often match 1-3 frames offset unless there's a drastic difference between the audio feed between cameras and master track. In most cases PluralEyes is able to match Alt takes as well as multiple vid clips to different sections of the audio., however, it will only treat each individual take as a whole. One vid clip with multiple takes isn't going to do so well in the sync department since you will need to cut every take separately beforehand and treat them as individual clips.