Sync footage with no audio to audio track

[Joe Marler]

[Brent Griffin] “I have 4 camera angles with slates with no audio… FCPX doesn’t do ‘tracks’ so to speak. So in parts where camera 3 has no footage, camera 4s footage drops down to 3s track, which is quite frustrating.

What would be best practice in FCP X to sync slate marks of footage and then sync all those takes to audio to then set up a multicam take?”

In general you sync multicam clips in the Event Browser, not the timeline. For a no-audio case, you can put a marker on the slate of each camera plus the recorder, then select all the clips, right-click and pick “New multicam clip”. Press the “use custom settings” button and for Angle Synchronization pick First Marker on the Angle. It will sync them based on the markers.

Once the MC clip is created and synced in the Event Browser, THEN you add selections of that to the timeline.

If adjustment of the sync is required, double-click on the MC clip to open it in the Angle Editor. That looks like a timeline but it’s not. It presents each camera/recorder in a separate lane or “track”. You can move clips or adjust the sync there.

In the Angle Editor, you can set a monitoring angle, select “sync to monitoring angle” by clicking on the drop-down menu at the left of the track. This enters a sync mode with a two-up display where you then click the skimmer on each slate event of each track you want to sync. For details see this video about multicam syncing tips, esp. starting about 04:40:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzTmjfEcYJc

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[Brent Griffin]

Thanks Joe, i’ll work through that but it sounds perfect. J

[Doug Metz]

To elaborate just a bit on Joe’s explanation:
Prior to creating the Multicam clip, you’ll want to set the camera angle for each of the clips.

In the Browser, select all of your Camera 1 clips.
Go to the Inspector’s ‘Info’ tab, and give those clips a label in the Camera Angle field, like ‘Cam 1’ (you can tag all of them at once).
Repeat for each of the camera angles and your sync audio.

This way, all of them will fall into their own lane when creating the Multicam clip.

Doug Metz

Dalton+Anode

[Brent Griffin]

Thanks Doug, this is a pretty great system.

All 4 cameras and 9 gopros are all now in sync and in their multicams.