From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 110

Sync picture and sound clips - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 110

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Sync picture and sound clips

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- [Instructor] While it's possible that you're going to have some kind of audio with your camera media to compare with your location sound recordings, it's also possible you'll have no audio at all with your visuals. For what it's worth, I'd encourage you to always get some kind of sound on camera. It makes an enormous difference when you're verifying that you have the right media. But, if you really have no way of doing that, you can still, of course, create new sync clips. While you can use the group clip function to match clips using in marks, let's take a look at how that compares with the auto sync feature. Here I've got a shot, three A three, that has no audio. And I'm going to locate the mark, there it is. I'm just using the arrow keys on my keyboard now to find that moment, and I'm going to mark an in. I'm just using this as a sync point on the clip. Now, this is shot three A three, so I'm going to look for my equivalent audio. Here it is. I'm going to open that up and I have my timeline window set to show me the contents of my source, so I'm going to zoom out a little so I can find that sync point. Let's have a listen about here. - [Announcer] Be on the mark (gun shooting). - [Instructor] Well, what do ya know? It was right there. I'm going to zoom in again, right here, line up my play head and mark an in. I'm pressing I here. And now, in my bin, I'm going to select that audio clip and I'm holding down Control on Windows or Command on Mac OS to choose the video clip so these two match. I'm going to right click, and I'm going to choose AutoSync. Several of the options will look very similar to group clip. I can specify, if I have it, to use sound time code. That's the linear time code taken from one of the audio channels. It's kind of old school now, but it may come up for you sometimes. I can specify endpoints, outpoints, or source time code auxiliary. All of these are the same as the group clip option. But notice now, I've got options to specify what's going to happen with my audio. I can choose whether or not I want to keep the audio that came with the video clip. Now, in this instance, I can see from my headings in my bin, that this clip has no audio at all. See, it's just video one. But, if it did have audio, I could choose to keep it. In fact I could specify exactly which audio channels I want, up to 64 of them. Also just under this, I have the option to specify which of the audio channels I'm going to take from my audio only clip. And again, I can take up to 64 of these. Notice you're always going to get that audio because, well to be honest, what's the point otherwise? It is an audio clip, so if you're not taking the audio, you don't really need it. Collapse Audio Tracks is a really smart option. If you have any unused audio channels in your source clip, Media Composer can automatically remove them and then just shuffle the channels that you're using up. So for example if only channels one and three were used, if you enable this option, channel two will be removed altogether, and channel three would become channel two. This may or may not be useful for you. It's useful in terms of editing and post production. But of course if you've got particular channel mappings used on location, your location notes, your location logs may not match the channels you end up with. If you do have location notes of this kind, you'll probably want to turn this off. So now I've got in points on both clips. I'm ready to sync and I'm going to click Ok. And right away it's very quick, there's no analysis here because I've already specified the sync point. I've got a new clip, which is called sync, in this case oh two 'cause I've tried this before. And you can see that the name of this sub-clip, it is a sub-clip icon, not a full blown master clip, is taken again from the video clip, and if I open this up, and on my timeline, I'll just enable waveforms. We can see all of the audio, and let's have a listen. (people talking) So far looking good, I'll just click along a little way. - [Man] Whoa, it looks like someone's keeping the Tooth Fairy busy. - You can say that, yeah. - [Instructor] Looking and sounding good. Now this is interesting isn't it? It's a sub-clip, not a master clip. And that means if I go to the Composer window, I can use Match Frame to locate my original master clip. I mapped Y on my keyboard to be the Match Frame keyboard shortcut. Match Frame just takes you to the current frame on the original master clip. Notice the icon's changed at the top here in the Composer window. This is now my original video, three A, no audio. You can see actually in the Timeline window, I don't have any audio tracks now. And so Match Frame is a very useful feature for following the electronic breadcrumb train if you like. Following that path back to your original content. Although the video and audio clips in the bin are both legitimate clips in their own right, and they are both a form of master clip, Media Composer tends to treat video clips as let's say more important than audio clips. Which is why when I went from my sub-clip, using Match Frame, back to the master clip, I was taken to the video and not the audio. If you're not familiar with Match Frame, check out the beginner skills course that I've recorded on Media Composer, which explains it, there's a lesson on that feature. You can find it in the Command Palette, right here. In the Other category right here. And when you choose Match Frame, Media Composer simply locates the original master clip and displays it in the source monitor, in the player monitor, based on the current location of your timeline playhead or in this case, of the playhead's position over a sub-clip. It's a great way of traveling back to your original media. So you can see why assistant editors have a long thankless task because if you are working with separate sync video and audio files, the task is to go through one after another after another after another, locating those clapper boards, marking the video in audio, selecting them, right clicking and syncing them. Remember, sub-clips depend upon the master clip, which in turn depends upon the media file. If I right click on this sub-clip and choose Reveal File, it's not going to work. I get a warning message saying you can't do this with sub-clips. However, if I go back to my three A three no audio one clip and choose Reveal File, it'll take me straight to my original QuickTime movies.

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