[This article was first published in the September, 2010, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe.]
I’m editing a corporate video shot by an essentially inept crew. To give you an idea of what I’m working with, it was an outdoor interview between two people. One camera was shooting a static wide shot of a building while recording the audio of the interview, while the second camera was recording the video of the two people talking, but only using the camera mike for audio. The second camera was also located about 20 feet away from the speakers.
It probably won’t surprise you when I say that the operator of camera one did not think it important enough to actually INCLUDE the people speaking in his shot. Like I said, they were inept.
Naturally, they did not use a slate, nor did they start recording at the same time. How was I going to get these synced? About the only way is to play both audio tracks at the same time and adjust one until they slipped into sync. 15 – 20 minutes of my time wasted, at least.
Then, I remembered that I had PluralEyes installed on my system. For those of you that have not heard of this product, it was specifically designed to sync clips and create multiclips based upon their audio. However, it can also sync clips in a sequence — even if there are timecode breaks in the clips — by aligning the audio.
To make a long story short, what I thought would take a long chunk of time to get these stupid clips synced, PluralEyes did in 51 seconds – I timed it. And the sync was perfect.
I was a believer before. But now, I’m a fan.
You can read my detailed product review here.
You can learn more here: www.singularsoftware.com
