Synchronizing audio is just amazing unbelieveable!!!!

I've been spending the greater part of my weekend practicing and preparing for a project where I'll be doing a double system for audio.

I am recording into a Nikon D800 for scratch track, but the audio I'll be using is recorded into a separate audio recorder.

I have a mixer set-up between recorder and the camera so sound is good.

I've run a series of tests: the first where I have the recorder set to record one giant file when I use record/pause in between takes, which I slate. I decided I did not like this method, and decided to actually start and stop the recorder during each take so that I get an individual audio file for each take.

Imported video with scratch and the hero recorder audio files into FCP X.

The first thing I did was to manually line up my slate tone from recorder to the tone on the scratch. And this worked fine except it took quite a while. It was a little more confusing having the one giant audio file with the multiple takes, but I figured it out.

My other test were separate hero audio files from recorder and separate video/scratch files. Since they were all individual, it at least I did not have to search for the section of audio for that particular take, thus my reason for sticking with the separate audio files for each take. Also time consuming!

So this is where I had some fun. I decided to try and sync a separate video/scratch to it's corresponding hero recorder audio and use the Synchronize Clips command. My first attempt with this did not yield very good results using the Automatic settings. However when I expanded the Synchronize menu, I saw that there was a checkbox for "Use Audio for Sync". I did this and about 3 seconds later there was the clip in the browser. I played this and it was TOTALLY in sync!!!!!!

What's more, the clip contains the original scratch track tht I can confirm sync with, which I will disable and use the hero track. It is great having this all contained in the clip so there is far less of a chance of moving something out of sync having separate audio and video tracks.

What took me about 8 minutes to manually do, using this feature in FCP X did it in seconds! Holy crap!

Then I decided for fun I would try and sync up my "Take 3" of the other test where all the audio for all the takes was one giant audio file. Again, it sync it beautifully!!!! Since this was "Take 3", the actual video clip was blank up to the point where it found the right point to sync. I just trimmed the part before and after the take.

To clean up things a bit, I then decided to trash all the clips in the browser, except the Synchronized clips, and that seems to be ok too!

I had to share this....

Jonathan

Thank you for sharing this, Jonathan. And great to hear you are having so much fun with the synchronizing feature.

Happy editing!

- Ronny

Jonathon,
Totally agree with you, amazing syncing. So very different from legacy FCP.
The ability to sync long files to short multiple takes is Wowza!
Combine this with Meta data to select the clips in the first place and FCPX really screams.

You have, however, entered the "Sync clips, or compound clips" which is better debate.
OK Ronnie, when and why should editors use one or the other?

Greg

And the other neat thing I mentioned is that apparently you can delete the separate audio/video imports after sync to tidy things up.

I have to say, the Sync Clips command is even more accurate than I was able to get manually doing this and I was being real careful!