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Should I be looking into Pluraleyes??
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Boy, I hate to disagree with Dave but I mix audio bit rates on multi cam and synchronized clips all the time. What you say used to be true under the old Final Cut but with Final Cut Pro X that is no longer a problem.
NewsVideo.com
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Ashley,
I’ve done a million of these. You DO want Plural Eyes. You do not want to use FCP’s sync. PE will do in 20 seconds what will take FCP an eternity (in comparison) and usually won’t get the sync right. If you were using long clips then FCP would be ok, but wedding videography tends to have lots of starts and stops. As long as the audio is running PE will do the job so easy its stupid.
Download the trial and test one against the other. You will pull out your credit card so fast to purchase it will make your head spin.
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[David Powell] “I’ve done a million of these. You DO want Plural Eyes. You do not want to use FCP’s sync…”
David, in my experience FCPX is very fast to sync very challenging sets of shots. Once for instance on a two hour 2 camera DSLR shoot the audio device failed to start so we had two cameras with dozens of individual clips and non-continuous audio. FCPX used a combination of audio and time to sync the whole thing up perfectly in under a minute. Even the the couple of places where there was no video was properly timed out.
I had problems initially with sync until I figured out how to properly label camera name, etc, and since then everything works as well if not better than Pluraleyes.
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In my experience, something which has a HUGE effect on the reliability of sync in FCPX, is the amount of DRIFT of your audio recorder. Even a very small amount of drift makes a difference and it can vary a lot, even among recorders of the same brand and model (the variation among video cameras on the other hand is usually quite small and can be ignored).
My recommendation is to always fix the drift BEFORE importing the audio files into FCPX. You basically do so by very precisely stretching the audio from your external recorder so that it perfectly matches the audio from your camera. The only real work is to first find out the precise amount by which you have to stretch your audio.
You can find this “magic number” by doing the following: Record simultaneously with your audio recorder and your main camera a minute of audio where there are just two sounds, one close to the beginning and the other close to the end. These sounds should be distinctive, short and loud, such as the sound of a clapperboard. Now compare the waveforms of both recordings with a precise audio editing application. If you carefully align the first sound, then scroll to the second sound and zoom in, you will most probably find that the waveforms of both recordings do not match. Now experiment until you find the exact number with which to stretch the external recording so that its waveforms match those of the camera to one sample (remember to keep checking the waveforms of both sounds). This number will be something like 0.00093% or 1.000023%, so it can take some time to find it out, but since it does not vary with time, but only from one recorder to the next, this is something you only have to do once for each recorder.
Now all you have to do from now on is to use this number to batch process the audio files from your external recorder before importing them to FCPX. I have had very good results using the freeware Audacity, both to find out the amount of drift as to batch process the files.
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[David Powell] “You DO want Plural Eyes. You do not want to use FCP’s sync. PE will do in 20 seconds what will take FCP an eternity (in comparison) and usually won’t get the sync right. If you were using long clips then FCP would be ok, but wedding videography tends to have lots of starts and stops. As long as the audio is running PE will do the job so easy its stupid.”
Yep, PE does this better accidentally than FCP X does on purpose. It’s all I use, and it’s damned fast compared to X.
There are some people that are hell bent on doing everything in X… I’m more of a why not do it better , faster kinda guy…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill
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I’m a cheap bastard. For $199, I’d try to make it work without Plural Eyes first. Even if it didn’t work perfectly, I can think of many things I’d rather do with a couple of C notes besides buy something that FCPX is supposed to do… even it it doesn’t do it quite as well.
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Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
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[Mitch Ives] “There are some people that are hell bent on doing everything in X… I’m more of a why not do it better , faster kinda guy…”
Exact same reason I choose to use FCPX rather than PE. Why use a 3rd party solution when I can do it just as fast and just as well in FCPX?
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