Multiple audio tracking sync’ing with FCPX

[T. Payton]

Hi Scott,

If you would be willing contact me via email I think I can help. It is my user name here without the period at my company name (see signature below) .net.

Maybe you can shoot me that really short clip and I can see if I can figure out what is happening as I have synced hundreds and hundreds of times in FCP X.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Scott Reynolds]

With some amazing detective work by T. Payton, there is a work around for this problem. The first step in the work around is to synchronize all the externally recorded audio tracks into a single clip. The second stage is simply sync’ing the original video clip, including the guide track and the sync’d clip created in step 1. The resulting clip includes all the audio – both guide and externally recorded tracks and their references in the audio pane of the inspector.

Again, thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions, and especially T. Payton who did the heavy lifting investigation into the issue.

Regards,
Scott

[Jeremy Garchow]

[scott reynolds] “The resulting clip includes all the audio – both guide and externally recorded tracks and their references in the audio pane of the inspector. “

Nice work.

What this does is create a polyphonic (multichannel) source, and then you sync the polyphonic FCPX clip to the video and guide track.

There was advice given earlier (and simply another way to do this) is to use Wave Agent from Sound Devices. This will create polyphonic files from disparate mono files. You would do this before importing and editing in FCPX.

https://www.sounddevices.com/products/waveagent/key-features/

This combines your 3 mono wav files in to one wav file with three channels. This cuts down on the amount of synchronized clips in your Event. You can then select ALL of the polyphonic clips in the Browser and assign names to the components or use only certain channels/etc. FCPX does work fairly well with polyphonic clips provided that all selected clips have the same number of channels. If they don’t, then you have to edit metadata on those clips separately. Fortunately, FCPX has a decent channel count display so you can easily sort the browser by channel count and make your determinations from there.

Jeremy

[T. Payton]

HI All,

I believe I narrowed down the bug here. Syncing more that to items which contain audio result in a synchronized clip with an improper audio configuration.

I believe this is not a syncing error but rather the audio configuration error which shows itself when synchronizing clips. I sent off a bug report. I would recommend that others who have experienced this do the same.

I realize why I have never seen this before even through I have multiple audio files to sync. My workflow with synchronized clips is:

1- Create a multicam clip.

2- Sync clips, then place in compound clip and break apart the synchronized clip. I do this to make is easier to modify the audio or color correct a video for a long interview (which is normally what I need to synchronize).

Other workarounds:

So the two items above are workarounds, and the third is to never sync more that 2 clips. So for 3 audio clips (A,B & C) and one video clip (V).

1 – synchronize A&B, resulting in D
2 – synchronize D&C, resulting in E
3 – synchronize E&V, resulting in your final synchronized clip with proper audio configuration.

Remember if this effects you, send the bug report off to Apple:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[T. Payton]

BTW. If you are wondering how to reproduce this problem. Just follow the procedure here:

https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0.6/#verc1fabc30

In all the tests I have done, one video clip and 2 audio clips will sync correctly, but the resulting clip will have the wrong audio configuration and you won’t be able to access both audio clips independently.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Michael Williams]

Found this thread hoping it would address my issue, but not quite…
I have 8 audio clips that were from lav mics worn by 8 different people, recorded by separate recorders. There were 7 cameras, some moving around, others fixed in several rooms. Each camera generated a few clips, and the clips have embedded audio.

In the audio clips from the lav mics, the sound is for the person wearing that mic. Each mic made a single long clip spanning all the video clips.

In the video clips, the camera audio has whatever is in the room (fixed cams) or field of view (moving cams). I don’t want to use the camera audio much, just for a tiny bit of room ambience.

The people were moving from room to room during the video clips.

So what I need to do (I think!) is sync and then cut the sequence of video shots (preferably using the multicam angle editor if possible). Then for each cut, have only the audio from the mics of people on camera in that cut.

I’ve tried making a multicam clip using all 8 audio tracks, along with all the video clips, but after selecting the cuts, how do I go through and enable/disable the audio lanes, so we only hear people who were on camera in that cut?

Thanks!

[T. Payton]

This is covered pretty well in the manual (it is amazing how handy it is 😉 Have a look here:

Multichannel audio editing examples
https://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.1/#verdcd16ec

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Michael Williams]

Thanks TP will try that. Are we saying that each cut within the multicam clip on the timeline will be granted it’s own channel configuration then? Or will the channel configuration span all the cuts within the multicam clip? I would need the former to be able to change which mics are active on a per cut basis.

[T. Payton]

Oh it’s totally flexible, and fantastic too. Make your multicam clip and then in the browser the clip selected (or multiple clips) name the audio channels, for example this:

Then on a clip by clip basis you can disable audio channels completely by just disabling them in the inspector. Then when you expand audio components you can trim, change overall volume, keyframe, apply effects, etc. to individual channels of audio.

It’s the most fantastical thing ever. 😉

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Oscar Santamaría]

I’m aware this is an old thread but I’ve searching around and have found this is pretty close to the problem I’m experiencing. My clips are made of one video track and 4 mono audio sources, each one of them is roled as boom 1, boom 2, rf 1 and rf2. At he beginning I had this issue of only being able to see in the inspector a mixed channel with all the sources. I could fix this by getting into its own timeline and breaking items apart until they couldn’t be broken apart anymore. So, if one of this clips is opened in its own timeline it shows one video track and 4 audio. If I check them in the inspector it shows the same, there are my four mono audio and roles are correctly assign. All fine until I started editing.

Here starts the weird stuff. If I take one of this clips and blade it, or copy/paste it or any kind of manipulation, channels start to get wrong. For example, I usually disable all but boom 1 as I prefer to cut that way. If I copy and paste the clip, next instance of the clip will show that only my first channel it’s activated but it plays a different source (for example rf 2, it seems to be pretty random). Even worst, it keeps the name and waveform of boom 1.

Some clips do this and some don’t. Can’t find a reason to it or a different procedure I did on those. Sometimes they even get wrong if I close and open fcpx.

It’s been an enormous nightmare as I’m a cutting a feature film and need to output audio correctly labeled to protools.

Any piece of advice would be extremely appreciated. Thanks.