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Is it possible to lay a group (or whole bin full) of clips on to a timeline at once such that they are spaced apart by the time elapsed between media end of preceding and media start of incoming clips
Or to put it another way, lay the clips on the timeline, such that they resemble the duration and pattern of filming across the day with gaps reflecting periods where no media was recorded? Maybe if I was to set the start timecode of the timeline so that it matched the media start of the first clip of the day, I could have each clip placed on it’s corresponding starting position on the timeline matching its media start point.
I know it’s an obscure request but I just realised this would be a really helpful ability to have if there’s an outside chance it can somehow be done.
I’m trying to sync sound, the production crew did not clap, and the button on and button off’s of the camera frequently aren’t synchronised even to the second. Often what they’re recording has no discernible visual references or sounds to use to try and match two events (or sounds) manually and the guide track audio is often too poor for plural eyes to pick up on.
I realised that where plural eyes has managed to succeed in syncing, it was easy to sync subsequent clips by just looking at the time elapsed between the end of recording one sound clip and the start of recording another and adding that much gap between them in the timeline. I then do the same to video files and everything syncs. It’s working a treat but it’s a bit laborious and if I could do this process automatically in two separate timelines; one for audio, one for video (their timecodes don’t match so I have to go by relative time between button on and button off) then I could copy and paste the audio timeline’s contents in to the video timeline and the relative spacing between audio clips should be preserved and thus sync with the video.
I’m pretty sure the answer is no and that final cut doesn’t offer any such functionality but I’m asking anyway just in case and also if any one knows some way of producing and XML document that would produce the metadata required to do this so I could just import that in to FCP and achieve the same effect.
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2 Replies
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spherico filmtools Sequence Liner
or try making a Multiclip Sequence
nick
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Hey mate, I downloaded that software but by that time I was finished doing it all manually over the course of a very boring day and I just didn’t have the strength to make myself dive back in to that any further than just the downloading of the software so I never saw what it was like or how I would use it to achieve what I was describing.
However for posterity, I have now, while using Avid on a different project discovered that this can be done automatically with no additional software. In Avid they call it auto-sequence. While when I researched this problem for FCP 7 using all kinds of keywords similar to what I used as the title for this post, I never found a solution but funnily enough if you look for ‘auto-sequence equivalent’ it’s actually answered right here on creative cow forums.
The very thing I was attempting to do exactly, is a usable function native to FCP 7 called ‘MAKE MULTICLIP SEQUENCE.’ If you select all the clips you want placed on a timeline in the manner I describe you select them all in the bin, and from the modify menu you should see the ‘make multiclip sequence’ option. You’ll be presented with a dialogue box asking about starting timecode for the sequence and about thresholds for what conditions it will also make multi clips from the clips you selected. If you set it to use source timecode for your sequence, your clips will be placed with gaps between them corresponding to the time between recording of each clip. FCP will also make multi clips for you where video sources have overlapped, and based on the values you set earlier, but in my circumstance I didn’t need that anyway because I was trying to sync sound. You can just throw those away if you don’t need them, the sequence is the important bit.
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