Saturday, January 19, 2019

PluralEyes Trouble Syncing Continuous Footage (splitting media into mutliple tracks for sync)

I have been working on a project where we shot a week of live performances running anywhere from 4 to 9 cameras with two dedicated audio recorders each night.  Before a program like Red Giant PluralEyes, this would have been a NIGHTMARE to organize and sync.

That said, it's still a bit of a nightmare.

One thing I've run into that I wanted to document for others but also for my own future reference is the difficulty PluralEyes has with syncing audio when the clips are butted up against one another.  In other words, with footage that has been recorded by a camera that records continuously but splits the footage up into multiple clips (we used some Sony AX100's and CX900's as "safety cams"), PluralEyes often freaks out.  As you're sitting there watching the sync, it looks like all is well.  All the clips are turning green and the arrows are lining up, but then at the last second... all the clips spread out and a good number of them turn red.

I've found a work around that isn't too terribly painful.  You just need to find the offending media and break it up into two tracks where you load every other clip.  For instance, all the footage from one of the Sony AX100's is placed into two bins, AX100 01 and AX100 02.  Then I place every other clip starting with the odd numbers in the "01" bin, and then every other clip starting with even numbers in the "02" bin.  This seems to make PluralEyes happier.

At first I was using the "Add takes in new bins (one file per bin)" button, but that becomes a nightmare to organize once you import the files into Premiere (so. many. tracks.).

So now, once I export my XML file from PluralEyes and then import it into Premiere, there are only two tracks for each "problem" camera, instead of a track for every clip from the offending cameras.