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Plural Eyes vs FCPX Test results: Confirmations and discoveries
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With me two cameras in a noisy kitchen with markers all good.
Camera name and angle did not help as much.
I am using one of this eececwllent digital iPad clapper boards…makes the edit simple and quick if markers need adding… Which they do for me. -
Do you set a marker on each separate clip in the angle?
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Yes on a non frame accurate clapper board clap…can be a second or so out does not seem to matter
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Yes that’s impossible for what I’m doing. Run and gun 3 hours of start and stop on each clip.
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To be fair I did one job “run and gun” in the same kitchen. No time for clapper and had two cameras starting and stopping perhaps 5 seconds apart.
Logging and putting markers on obvious sync points was a day of my time. But it worked. Initially I synced one take at a time but I just did a test and selected all the takes and it synced them beautifully into one long multi-cam clip which could have saved me probably another day… maybe more.
I lose track of time as I get paid by the job not by the day.
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Sounds like a kitchen has a lot more consistent volume control. When I say run and gun, I mean cameras running into different ruins and pulling the audio through the wall.
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Well apparently you can’t copy/paste multiple clips into an angle editor. Too bad. Guess I’ll have to stick with the Plural Eyes route. Maybe they can fix the playback issue. I think Bill is on to something with the sync method differences going on internally between X and PE. Either that or there is some bad code in the XML, but thats all way above my pay grade, which isn’t much to start with.
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I’m able to paste multiple clips into the angle editor, copied right from the event browser or the timeline, even using gap clips in the primary to space out clips (randomly spaced as a test) and they paste into the angle editor as expected (no gap clip but clips spaced accordingly). Just make sure to set the monitoring angle to the angle you want to paste into.
Hope it works for you.
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David Powell- “after being challenged by David Eaks and Bill Davis on both issues”.
Could you remind me which thread that was? Searching my previous posts, I can’t seem to find it.
I really think that the audio is what’s giving X a hard time syncing you’re clips but when you say FCPX doesn’t even get it right with simple two camera, good audio, long clips, there’s got to be something up. I have no experience with Plural Eyes but the fact that it syncs so quickly with the bad audio you describe is impressive. If only the rest of the workflow was working correctly! Does plural eyes only use audio to sync?
In the situation you describe, you’re really making it tough on yourself. Relying on audio from cameras that are roaming around between different rooms to sync the clips. This must have been discussed already but why aren’t you syncing the cameras timecode at the start of the shoot? Sorry I don’t remember all the details from the discussion thus far.
I just did a test. Clips from two cameras recording over a period of about 7hrs with 20-30 clips per camera, a few minutes per clip. Both Sony NX5s, start and stopped recording independently. Cam 1 audio is both the on-camera shotgun and a line feed from an audio board with boom mics. Cam 2 is shotgun only. 2 person interviews, both cameras close to the talent. Here is what I did.
-New event and project
-Import all of cam 1, select all these clips, enter camera name “cam1” and angle name “1” in the inspector
-Repeat for cam 2
-immediately select all of the clips (while they are still importing, just to make things difficult for X, I guess) and choose create new multicam clip. Choose to use audio for sync and arrange angles by angle name (which probably doesn’t make a difference)
-wait 10 minutes for sync to finish
-open multicam clip in angle editor and check sync, it all looks good.
Maybe the sync wasn’t incredibly fast, but simple as can be. This is my usual method and it almost always works flawlessly. Most of the time it’s just two cameras with two 1hr clips each, for these I like the method Michael mentioned. I’ll make a multicam clip with only one clip, then add the rest in the ballpark and sync to monitor angle. I think it’s faster than FCPX doing it. In a case where one camera is significantly closer to the action, the delay will leave the image a couple frames off. It’s easy enough to nudge all the clips from one angle into place at once. I always manually check sync no matter the method used. Since using FCPX multicam, I’ve been completely care free with no time code and start/stop recording at will, confident that FCPX will handle it (being conscious of my audio for syncing later). When I’ve demonstrated it to editor colleagues who do not use FCPX, they are thoroughly impressed with the resulting angle editor layout. But my cameras are not roaming around in separate rooms. For that I’d sync free run timecode for sure.
I think I already mentioned this in the other thread (the thread I couldn’t find), but when I’ve had difficulty with syncing due to poor audio, I’ll temporarily enhance the audio with loudness and background noise removal and/or manual adjustments. Even if it sounds terrible to the ear, and even “ruining” the better audio to match the other camera. FCPX is able to pick out matching sounds and sync the clips. I haven’t had to do that more than a couple times but it has proven effective. If plural eyes only uses audio to sync, I’m fairly confident this will work for you in FCPX.
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David thanks for the reply.
By “challenge” I meant you challenged my assertion that FCPX wasn’t up to the task of what I’m doing for syncing. And rightfully so, as it’s working beautifully for you. I’m wondering if my lack of naming the angle makes a difference. It works perfectly on more controlled environments. I just name the cameras and choose “order by camera name” rather than angle. I thought it was more of an either or, but I’ll try both and see what happens. I am curious why the copy paste didn’t work for me. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I’m copying from the plural eyes project. Doesn’t make sense, but I’m gonna try it again now that i’ve upgraded and see what happens.
Unfortunately I have no control over the shoot, so tc syncing isn’t gonna happen. If I were doing interviews, then I’m sure fcp would be up to the task. In fact I use it on such projects and it works great even at an hour length with multiple clips. But when volume is erratic to the camera, its not so great. But even after the initial sync, I find that I have to line the clips pretty close to where it matches before a “sync selection” is successful. Especially with a long multi clip.
The reason for all of this is that the FCP 7 workflow always relied on Plural Eyes for these jobs. And it worked pretty flawlessly. You used PE to create a sync map on then you exported each track as a reference, reimported them and used them as a few long clips to set in points and create a multi clip. Pretty easy.
The only reason there’s a problem here is because PE’s XML isn’t working on the event side. What I’m doing at this point is working. I would just love to use the event side to make selects rather than having to do it from the storyline. I actually don’t care that PE syncs faster than FCP. I’m willing to wait so long as it’s accurate. I’m going to try angle instead of name and see if that makes a difference and also try and figure out why the copy paste won’t work from the PE project to the angle editor.
Thanks for your help and input.
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