You can find out more about it here on the blog, or at Amazon. If you’re interested in more Media Composer techniques like this, check out my new book, Avid Agility. With that idea in mind, you should be able to sync as precisely as anyone ever did in a film editing room.
Keep in mind that in a 24-frame environment, the camera is typically shooting at about 1/50th of a second and that the exposure occurs in the middle of a frame that’s being displayed for a 24th of a second. If you’re syncing to the nearest frame, you won’t be able to achieve this much precision, but at least you’ll know what you’re aiming for. But if you look carefully, you can generally assign all slates to one of these three cases. Syncing with this kind of accuracy takes work - blurred slates are always somewhat ambiguous. The camera captured the slate in motion, but not in its fully closed position. Here, the second frame is blurred, but if we look closely, it remains open. The audio clap goes in the middle of that frame. The shutter was open when the slate closed and the camera captured an image of the closed slate within the blur. Did the slate close while the shutter was open? Notice that within the blurred image you can see both the top and bottom of the closed slate. To decide where to put the audio clap, we have to examine that blurred image carefully. The waveform of the clap is lined up at the head of frame two. Check the images below (click to blow them up). So the slate hit somewhere between those two exposures. We make the assumption that the camera is making its exposure in the middle of each frame. That’s the standard situation - no ambiguity, no blurred images. In the first frame, the slate is clearly open, in the second it’s clearly closed, and in the third, it’s closed, as well. Only with that context can you understand what happened at the slate closure. Here’s my interpretation.įirst, you can’t sync properly without checking at least three frames - the frame where the slate closes, the frame before it, and the frame after it. When we worked with film there was plenty of debate among assistant editors about this. How you handle them is crucial to good sync. That’s trivial, right? You just line up the visual slate closure with the sound clap and you’re all set. It comes with a couple of other minor limitations, as well, but I used it successfully on my last Red show, and wouldn’t want to be without it.Įither way, you’ll have to check every slate by eye. You have to turn on film options when you first create your project - even if you never plan to touch a frame of film. Perf Slip is slick and quick but it comes with some limitations.
Second, and even better, you can use the Perf Slip feature to sync to the nearest 1/4 frame.
Then mark the slates and autosync to merge them again. If your clips are pre-synchronized, load them into the source monitor, select video or audio and subclip to separate picture and sound. First, you can use Autosync to merge audio and video clips. Media Composer allows us to sync in two ways. If you’re in sync there, you have a shot at staying in sync further down the food chain. This takes time, but sync starts with dailies. In my editing rooms, we always check sync using slates, and resync if necessary. The result is that picture and sound slowly drift out of sync. Production is supposed to jam (synchronize) their clocks several times a day, but in the heat of battle that doesn’t always happen. It doesn’t take much drift to put you out of sync a frame or two. But this inevitably involves two clocks, and that means they are subject to drift. Doesn’t timecode make all that trivial? Yes, with digital cameras, automatic syncing is standard practice. In 2011, hand syncing of dailies seems downright anachronistic.