sync 3 separate tracks precisely by eyeballing objects audio wav

mintintegral33 wrote on 11/7/2018, 10:26 PM

short question: How can I zoom into a track and match the 2 audio wavforms, exactly, without this weird snapping that Movie Edit Pro is doing? The goal is so that the video and audio sync up as best as possible.

the long same question: Hi, I've made some progress with Movie Edit Pro, via youtube and this forum. I have 2 .mov files from iPad and iPhone, to record a music video of playing guitar. My 3rd track is only Audio, which has the audio I prefer to use for the song, instead of the .mov audio. The problem, is that when I separate the Video and Audio tracks, and display Waveform, I cannot exactly match the 'video audio' to the primary 'audio only' .wav file wavforms. I can do this in Samplitude for example, but the zoom and adjust limit is much higher, like 1 hertz or cycle somemthhinng. I have uploaded a screen shot. When I search online for this, too many posts come up about sync-ing. I also tried unchecking the Magnet button on the toolbar, hoping the objects would not Force a 'snap' to the grid in Movie Edit Pro. Or is the grid there because of each frame from the iPad mov file? Actually that is not my question, but I am always interested in technology, but mostly, I want to know, is there a setting I can toggle in Movie Edit Pro to allow me to eyeball and click and mouse-drag the video and audio track to match the primary audio track? To be specific, I can zoom into 00:00:22:03, and drag the video track here, or my only other choice is 00:00:22:04. It's not terrible as the sync is quite close, but if I am overlooking a setting, please let me know. As each video of a cover song I make, seems to be random, some waveforms are snapped more closely, while this one, if I could drag the top video track to the second between 03 and 04, would be more precise. Thank you.

Comments

shgrude wrote on 11/8/2018, 3:48 AM

@mintintegral33 Not sure if you are aware of the timescale, but the last number in the timereference is the frame number (not fractions of a second). You can clearly see that your film is shot with 30 fps as it goes from 00:00:21:29 to 00:00:22:00

That is why it will snap, as a frame is the tiniest unit for the movie. As the two movies need to be aligned framewise.

emmrecs wrote on 11/8/2018, 4:48 AM

@mintintegral33

shgrude is completely correct; those number are frames and ALL video must be "frame-accurate", you cannot have even "half-frame" alignment.

Have you tried the option to "Align audio objects with this track"? To do this right click on the audio track from one of your videos and select that option. MEP will then attempt to "move" the other video and separate audio so they align with the track you have chosen. The level of accuracy with which it is able to do this can be variable, especially the longer the track is. Because...

... independent digital recorders do not always maintain absolutely "locked" time with reference to each other, they cannot because each is referencing its own time base. Each will be as individually precise as they can be but each may "vary" and differ from each other, especially over the longer term. Hence, the loss of sync/frame-accuracy which you are clearly experiencing.

If it is really important to you to maintain absolute frame-accuracy between your video and independent audio tracks you will have to seriously investigate software like Red Giant's Plural Eyes. This (rather expensive) app takes your video and audio files and "adjusts" all of them to perfect alignment; in practice this often means it "recreates" the independent audio file, which you can then import to your MEP timeline and know it will "sync" perfectly. I've used Plural Eyes successfully on a multicam wedding video, two HD cameras and two independent audio recordings, with individual files being each more than one hour long; subsequent editing/mixdown in VPX was a "doddle" because PE had done the work to ensure the frame-accurate sync throughout.

HTH

Jeff

RogerGunkel wrote on 11/8/2018, 6:30 AM

My business is wedding video and small theatre productions, so I am constantly synching audio and video footage. A typical wedding for me is 3 camera streams of 4k video and audio and 2 audio recorders. Church weddings and shows are typically up to an hour of continuous footage on each camera and recorder, and particularly with wedding speaking, exact synch is essential.

My work method is to lay all the video tracks in parallel, and roughly synch them to within a second or so using the waveforms. I then lay down in parallel on a fresh track, the audio recording that I intend to use as the master track. I lock the master track, then lay any other audio on other fresh tracks. I then use the auto waveform synch that Jeff mentioned, to synch each video and audio track individually to the audio master track. As Jeff correctly points out, over a long file there will likely be some slight drift, but that really doesn't matter because each time I cut to a different camera angle, I simply auto synch it again to the master track. That means that as I edit each new shot, I am maintaining synch. In the unlikely event that you are using one very long continuous single camera shot, if you notice slight drift, you can always delete a single video frame which will be to small to notice or if the video is falling behind the audio, just cut the video track, move the following section along one frame and take a still of the previous frame before the cut and insert it into the one frame gap. You will not see the additional frame as it is too quick.

I have on occasion used eyeball synching at frame level and you can move the video to the closest frame, but as the closest frame will mean that it could only be a maximum of half a frame out, you would never see the difference in real time.

Hope that helps,

Roger

mintintegral33 wrote on 11/9/2018, 9:47 AM

Thank you. I actually could not find this in my right click menu, so I asked support. This is a Plus or Premium feature so with Movie Edit Pro (Classic version), the 'context menu, Audio Objects, align other...' does not exist. I am using, Movie Edit Pro 2016, 15.0.0.90 (UDP3). Also, glad to know about the cutting or adding a frame to fix drift, which I haven't had to deal with, but I have seen it with some longer videos in a different windows program.

browj2 wrote on 11/9/2018, 10:15 AM

@mintintegral33

We normally tell people to purchase at least the Plus version as one will quickly run into limitations somewhere with the basic (classic) version. The difference between the Plus and Premium versions is only with third party add-ons, not in the program.

Further to what was said about the smallest movement of an object being 1 frame, obviously a video clip cannot be moved to less than 1 frame. However, Magix Video Pro X allows you to move an audio object freely to within 1 frame. This is not available in MEP Plus/Premium.

One other thing to consider when lining up audio files is the distance from the sound source of each file. If they are significantly different, then another problem is introduced. At 30fps, 11m represents 1 frame. If your audio file is taken from the microphone/mixer output at the source, but your camera is 22m away, then adjusting your audio file to the camera audio will still be slightly out of sync by 2 frames because the camera video/audio is already out of sync. Just a few more things to consider.

John CB

mintintegral33 wrote on 11/9/2018, 10:32 AM

cool. thank you