I produce multi-camera unscripted/doc/reality programming, and consistently find myself needing a reliable way to sync several layers of stop/start cameras with free run TC to a timecoded audio source.
I have spent a good amount of time working with PPro's "synchronize" function in the timeline, and found it to be completely awesome in theory, but pretty limited in practice. It can only do one clip at a time, and ultimately it's not much of a timesaver beyond just copying and pasting start timecodes of clips and editing them into the timeline that way. I even tried making a 6-hour timecoded slug track and mass syncing to that -- no dice. It seems like the functionality is there, it just needs to be expanded. I don't suppose anyone knows whether Adobe plan on this in the future? Right now it's a serious roadblock preventing me from moving all my broadcast productions to PPro instead of Avid MC.
The functionality I need would be akin to the auto sequence function in Avid MC. It would go something like this:
- Assign each camera a video track
- Drop all clips from that cam into that track
- Drop dual system audio WAVs onto their own tracks
- Use plugin to align all clips (while keeping them on the track they're on) to the corresponding "master track" timecode on the timeline (starting TC of the timeline would have to be set in advance, or perhaps could be set as part of the plugin's workings)
Many people would point me to Pluraleyes for this, but it's not always an option because I frequently have at least 1 camera far enough removed from the action so that it can't pick up useable scene audio. We are jam synced to free run TC via LockIt Boxes on each camera. I also can't use multiclipping in PPro, because it treats each stop/start as a new angle, and that quickly becomes untenable on a 12-hour x 4 cameras shoot day.
If you're a developer and you've read this far, maybe you have an idea of how this could be solved. Let's talk -- I'd be willing to make a financial investment in making this a reality!
Thanks
Chris