Suggestion that may help syncing overlay to video track.

[MikeB51]

Sorry if this is common knowledge but I have seen a few posts regarding this and just found something that helped me.

I was just editing a piece and trying to sync the overlay track with the video track. What I did was to get a rough allignment then I switched to Audio View and picked a fairly sharp sound on each and lined them up. It worked great.

Hope I'm not telling anyone to suck eggs.

Kind regards,
Mike.

[2Dogs]

Clapperboard!

[daniel]

Well when you shoot at a family meeting with three cameras having different time settings, even so little, and every camera starts and stop according to where there's something that might be interesting, the method explained by Mike is the only one I found.

But when you want to sync 4 or 5 one full hour tape spread over 10 hours it's a royal pain in the thing. Been there, done that, the only way is to first create a 10-12 hours black color clip and start one overlay track by tape, put everything on the right timing, with help of sound. When all sound tracks stop being a messy noise and become a clear multi-channel track you're done.

The only little remaining work is to remove all void parts and then select which cam you will use on the end track. The BIG problem is you can't cut the overlay tracks, you have to move them to the main even for a single cut (I'm not asking multi-trim here).

[Ron P.]

The BIG problem is you can't cut the overlay tracks, you have to move them to the main even for a single cut (I'm not asking multi-trim here).

With VS10+, no you can not, with VS11+ yes you can..

[Black Lab]

And I don't understand the 10-12 hours of a black color clip. If you have nothing on the main track, and clips on the overlays, the color "behind" your overlays will be whatever you have your background color set to (in Preferences - default is black). There's no need to put a color clip on there.

[daniel]

The BIG problem is you can't cut the overlay tracks, you have to move them to the main even for a single cut (I'm not asking multi-trim here).

With VS10+, no you can not, with VS11+ yes you can..;)

VS11 is out of the question, does not work under windows 2000.

[daniel]

And I don't understand the 10-12 hours of a black color clip. If you have nothing on the main track, and clips on the overlays, the color "behind" your overlays will be whatever you have your background color set to (in Preferences - default is black). There's no need to put a color clip on there.

It's there so that you have a unique time reference, sort of poor man's Time Code. Otherwise I think you project cannot be extended past the last clip. I admit I didn't even try it.

Each clip is then positionnned at it's right place. The clip shot at 13:45:02:15 (displayed when you preview the clip) is placed under the color clip at 1:45:02:15 relative project time.
And so for each clip then you begin the next tape on the second overlay etc.. When it's all done you have a say 8 hours project with clips scattered everywhere, a general overview of what you have .

Only 1:00:00:00 of cam1 is not exactly the same time as the 1:00:00:00 of cam2 or 3. Then you align a long clip that is in two cams at least with the sound as previously discussed. You now know the time difference between those two tapes and you can select and move everything together of the same value. Those two are now in sync. Rinse, repeat.

At the end you have a 3 or 4 camera film perfectly synchronized with the same number of sound recordings, from which you select the two that best fits the clip you eventually retain, on voice and music track.

I export that sound as I found that mixing the three microphones' output is the best overall sound since it evens out the problems from cameras' microphone distances to sound position.

I am ready to PAY for any faster, easier, more accurate and less tedious method, but not much. Not the price of Edius or MediaStudio for instance.