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RED Footage and sound syncing
Hi All,
This seems to be an issue that most people don’t have an issue with, but I’m stumped on the best way to get sound and RED footage working together in Premiere CS6.
The Backstory: My friend just just finished a bunch of footage overseas. He wasn’t expecting to shoot on RED, so we didn’t research the audio side of it as much as we should have. So we have great footage with no reference audio shot on a Scarlet, and great audio in a format that REDCINE-X doesn’t like, recorded on a Zoom H4n. And we’re trying to bring them together.
The two standard ways of doing it is to either use the merged clips in Premiere Pro, or to sync the clips in REDCINE and export them again. Lots of people have advised us not to use merged clips, because of the problems they create further down the line, so I’ve been working on syncing in REDCINE. The manual sync process isn’t bad, but:…
Is there a way to export footage from REDCINE so that premiere both sees the external audio, but still gives access to all the nice things in RED (Editing the R3D file in Premiere, ect)?
I don’t think there is, because I see lots of people requesting Adobe to recognize the external audio from the R3D file, But maybe I’ve missed something.
If anyone could give advice on their RED/Audio work flow, I’d appreciate it.
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4 Replies
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There is currently no way to gain access to the external audio synced by Redcine-X within Premiere Pro. As to if that’s Adobe’s fault, I don’t know; it could also be a major limitation from RED as to what other programs can access via their SDK.
Merging gets really weird quickly. I have an internal app that will break merged clips back to their originals but because of Premiere’s project format, it just barely works enough to be useful and I haven’t tried running large complicated projects through it.
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Angelo LorenzoNeed to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Try this:
– Sync in Redcine-X, export as an intermediate format of decent quality (ProRes std or Avid DNxHD 175) with full quality production audio.
– Edit as needed
– Unlink audio
– Reconform video to the RED files as you enter finishing
That’ll probably be the easiest way to work with RED files while still having access to production-quality audio.
One drawback: The sound tracks are named after the video file, not much metadata (if I recall) that will point back to the original files.
May work for you.
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Angelo LorenzoNeed to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks -
Hello Angelo.
Thanks for the advice. We’ll try that out. We had hoped to be able to work with the RED footage natively (one of the reasons we’re working with Premiere), but this audio thing is a bit of a pain.
I saw that in this thread: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/242/6189#6215, you talked about editing from the timeline. We’re experimenting with that too. Syncing on the timeline is easy, but after that it gets more clumsy. Would you mind giving a few points on how you do it?
Your blog is great, BTW. I came across it a few months back when we first started looking at RED Stuff. That video with Michael Cioni you posted was particularly good. Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks for the compliments.
I’ve been trying to take advantage of the trim tools and the source/project monitor. With that said, I’ve switch my method of working.
I do use merged clips. I, however, have an internal app to convert merged clips back to their original counterparts. It’s super messy and has a lot of caveats so I strictly save it as the last editorial step before it enters finishing.
For the average user, I would probably suggest editing with scratch audio as much as you can, then using plural eyes on the final timeline. The resulting timeline will have gaps, so it’ll need to be trimmed/conformed before going to finishing.
Luckily both methods seem to introduce only little extra work if a revision is ordered.
YMMV but I think it’s a good trade off because you can use more Avid-style cutting and save time there. The Bin-to-source-monitor workflow allows you to browse metadata in the bin and start working. Try finding a circle take when scrubbing through a timeline; gets messy fast.
——————–
Angelo LorenzoNeed to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
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