Audio / Video Sync

Hi there,

We're shooting a TV commercial on the 5D MkII next week and using the Tascam DR70D for audio. We'll be sending a feed of the output from the DR70D to the camera for synchronising later in FCP X.

The question I have is, if we bring all of the audio and video into FCP X and want to effectively create multicam clips substituting the cam audio with DR70D audio, is that something we would need to do a clip at a time or is there a workflow that will allow us to basically select all video and all audio and batch create compound clips with correct audio synched and grouped with the correct clip.

Hope that makes sense.

Create a multicam clip with all cameras and the master audio.
Open the Angle Viewer.
Set to switch both audio and video.
Select the master audio track.
Set to switch only video angels.
Edit away.

Damiangrady,

Like Ben said creating multicam with the DR-70D is a piece of cake. I also use the DR-70D and love it. You will find that the audio you feed from it to the 5DII will be very good and you'll be able to do a lot with the 4 audio tracks from the DR-70D.

Suggestion: Use the dual audio level recording function as it can be a life saver. Also, with an external USB connected battery you can run easily for over 8 hours!

I read Damian's question differently... it seems to me that he is not shooting multiple cameras. Just a single camera with the Tascam doing dual-system sound that the needs to sync up to the camera in post.

In this case, he does not need to create a multicam clip.

If that is in fact the case, Damian, there is no means natively in FCPX to batch the process of syncing audio that I know of. You select a camera clip, then select the corresponding audio file, then you choose "Synchronize Clips" from the Clip menu. Rinse and repeat.

You can use a third party tool like PluralEyes to achieve more of an automated batch version of this, but there are trade-offs depending on your workflow.

The Synchronize clips works remarkably well!

damiangrady wrote: ...if we bring all of the audio and video into FCP X and want to effectively create multicam clips substituting the cam audio with DR70D audio, is that something we would need to do a clip at a time or is there a workflow that will allow us to basically select all video and all audio and batch create compound clips with correct audio synched and grouped with the correct clip...

I've never been able to get FCP X to reliably sync a large number of video and audio clips via audio waveform. Using PluralEyes I have sync'd hundreds of clips in a single batch.

In one situation the Tascam recorder was set for the wrong date/time, so each audio clip had no timestamp to help find the corresponding video file. This wasn't discovered until later, so the entire project was shot that way. We used PluralEyes to sync up every video and audio file over the entire shoot (many gigabytes of .wav files alone) in a single batch and it worked. It also works if you have a particular video file and you want to search across many audio files in many folders for a waveform match.