Plural Eyes vs FCPX Test results: Confirmations and discoveries

[David Eaks]

I understood what you meant by “challenge” and didn’t take it offensively. I literally couldn’t find the previous thread or my reply to you. Something funny is going on with the COW. Does everyone else have two posts with broken links from the COW news droid stuck at the top of new posts?

[David Powell] ” I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I’m copying from the plural eyes project.”

Maybe if you first paste the clips from the plural eyes project to a regular timeline, they will Copy/paste into the angle editor.

I also did a second sync test, this time with a third set of clips, which were the Ki Pro recordings of a live mix between those two cameras, also start and stopped independently. Imported and named the camera “Ki Pro” and the angle “3”, then created another multicam clip with all three angles. It finished in 6 minutes. Because of the slight delay from the boom mics to the camera mics, the picture was a frame or two off in one clip or another. If I was actually going to use this multicam clip it wouldn’t take long to nudge the clips into place relative to the audio that will be used in the timeline. It would probably be even easier if I turned off the line feed on cam 1, so it would sync perfectly with cam 2 (both same distance from talent), leaving only the Ki Pro out by a frame.

I actually did a screen recording of these tests. I sped it up and blurred the content but it shows exactly what I did. Of course, again, the audio is clean and controlled (except for the ranch dogs, loud bugs in the trees, and location visitors coming and going. All causing many retakes) which isn’t really a fair comparison.

*Edit
…and here is the screen capture-

https://youtu.be/3q-ItHe1t8k

[James Ewart]

Have you found yourself in an environment where there are a number of not super well-disciplined camera people with SLR’s ‘boshing’ all over the place without really sparing even half a second’s thought for the person (editor) who is left (or lumbered even) with the responsibility of syncing it all up and putting it all together?

If so I empathise and fear you are not alone. Trying perhaps to find the least painful workflow to get everything joined up so you can actually start doing your job.

[David Powell]

Ok for some reason I wasn’t able to copy paste from the storyline the first time but don’t need to anyway. I copied each angle from the Plural Eyes generated multi clip in the angle editor and pasted it in a dummy multi clip, using the start timecode of the first clip on each angle. And the clip plays as it should on the event side.

Now I have playback on the event level and a way to to sync wild, non tc synced run and gun cameras with speed. Hopefully Plural Eyes can fix this problem but I won’t complain about an additional 5 minutes of setup. This has irked me to no end for the last year.

[David Eaks]

That’s awesome. Glad you got a workflow that does what you need figured out.

Now, I wonder how well FCPX 10.1 syncs… ; )

[David Powell]

I appreciate the help along the way. I actually tried first in 10.1. Couldn’t sync it. Maybe I’m not smart enough to do it in X. As long as I’m not losing time (I believe I’m gaining quite a deal) its all good.

[David Eaks]

For sure, I have fun with it. I don’t doubt that it’s just X having trouble with the audio and not your fault, there really isn’t all that much to it. Makes sense that Plural Eyes could be a better sync solution for what you need to do, being that it’s a dedicated app purpose built for syncing.

Out of curiosity, did you ever try letting FCPX enhance the audio before attempting to sync?

[David Powell]

Never tried the audio enhance. Never really thought of it to be honest.

[David Eaks]

Oh, yeah I mentioned it earlier in the thread. It’s worked for me in the past. Enhance, sync, disable enhancements.