Recording audio with an external device i.e zoom h4

[Mark Moreve]

Hi
I 'm buying a zoom h4 audio recorder so when I do interviews with the 5d2 I can use a clapper board and sync up the sound & picture in post but can anybody tell me what there workflow is to do this and if the camera is recording at 30fps do you have to do something with the audio to make it 30fps as well.
cheers
Mark

[Eric Darling]

In FCP, you simply need to reduce the speed of the audio clips to 99.9%, and they'll sync perfectly over the duration of any clip.

There's also a third-party product called PluralEyes that allows you to sync a bunch of clips on the same sequence, so long as you're also recording audio from the on-camera mic.

[Wayne Avanson]

Philip Bloom did a tutorial on it here

Syncing audio and video shot on 5d and Zoom using FCP and Pluraleyes on Vimeo

Avey

[Douglas Joseph]

if you change the speed to 99.9 in final cut, it doesn't change it to that exactly... it'll change it to like... 99.3, or whatever.

[Evan Donn]

You don't need to change the audio speed, just get FCP set up properly - details are here:

25 Hour Day: DSLR Dual-System Audio: The 99.9% Solution

This really should be a sticky as I've posted the link about a dozen times in response to this same question and yet people still seem to be using the 99% solution.

That easy setup works whether you are using pluraleyes or not - but you definitely want to use pluraleyes if you're planning to sync more than a few clips. No need to clap shots either.

[Rich Castro]

You didn't mention what NLE you'll be using. If you happen to be a windows user and find a solution, I'd love to hear it.

The combo of the Zoom / 5D / Cineform / Sony Vegas has been a giant headache for me.

I'd love to hear from some Windows users out there.

[Michael Maloney]

If you use a male to male 3.5mm stereo jack and don't mind being tethered to the H4N, you can record audio directly into the 5D and also record into the H4N as a backup. Works great with Magic Lantern.

[David W. Taylor]

My workflow is a 'Windows' one. The PC runs Vista 64:
I have an Edirol R44. It's a 4 channel recorder, so I'm able to have an on camera mic (Senn 416), a radio mic and if I'm in a fixed position, a stereo fx mic running at the same time.
I feed the 'most important' two channels of the R44 audio back into the 5D2, with Magic Lantern setting the analogue gain to '0'.
I use Premier Pro CS4 to edit after transcoding using NeoScene. NeoScene adjusts the audio for the drop from 30 to 29.97 that it does and although the sizes are pretty huge, at least hard-disc space is now 'reasonable' and the files play with no problems in CS4.
The R44 audio, which I record at 48k, is easy to sync up on the timeline using the 5D2 waveforms and I certainly see no need for 'Pluraleyes'.
My projects are always 48k so the 5D2 audio (44.1k) is sample rate converted by Premiere when imported but infact I always use the R44 sound anyway.
There is a slight drift on long 10-12 minute files, which is due to the fact that both camera and audio recorder are 'free running'.
I've noticed that Premiere can produce some slight digital artifacts if I try to adjust the audio, however being a sound engineer I therefore use my studio DAW (a Fairlight) to slightly tweak the audio if I need to when I do a sound dub on the edited video.
I can see that this could be problematic for users without the luxury of an audio system like mine. I would suggest that cutting big audio files down in size and then tweaking those would almost certainly give good results in Premiere or perhaps using WaveLab or a similar audio program.
Premiere however now allows an OMF transfer of the projects audio out to my DAW, at last making it, in my eyes, a completely professional editing program.

[Bill Binder]

Originally Posted by David W. Taylor

My workflow is a 'Windows' one. The PC runs Vista 64:
I have an Edirol R44. It's a 4 channel recorder, so I'm able to have an on camera mic (Senn 416), a radio mic and if I'm in a fixed position, a stereo fx mic running at the same time.
I feed the 'most important' two channels of the R44 audio back into the 5D2, with Magic Lantern setting the analogue gain to '0'.
I use Premier Pro CS4 to edit after transcoding using NeoScene. NeoScene adjusts the audio for the drop from 30 to 29.97 that it does and although the sizes are pretty huge, at least hard-disc space is now 'reasonable' and the files play with no problems in CS4.
The R44 audio, which I record at 48k, is easy to sync up on the timeline using the 5D2 waveforms and I certainly see no need for 'Pluraleyes'.
My projects are always 48k so the 5D2 audio (44.1k) is sample rate converted by Premiere when imported but infact I always use the R44 sound anyway.
There is a slight drift on long 10-12 minute files, which is due to the fact that both camera and audio recorder are 'free running'.
I've noticed that Premiere can produce some slight digital artifacts if I try to adjust the audio, however being a sound engineer I therefore use my studio DAW (a Fairlight) to slightly tweak the audio if I need to when I do a sound dub on the edited video.
I can see that this could be problematic for users without the luxury of an audio system like mine. I would suggest that cutting big audio files down in size and then tweaking those would almost certainly give good results in Premiere or perhaps using WaveLab or a similar audio program.
Premiere however now allows an OMF transfer of the projects audio out to my DAW, at last making it, in my eyes, a completely professional editing program.

I manually sync a lot of music events to 5D2 video and one tip I might share on the "free running" thing (I'm amazed by how many people think two completely separate audio sources should stay in sync without running off the same clock, but I digress) when it comes to the 5D2 is to manually sync the MIDDLE of the video clip. That way if you do have drift, you'll limit it to a maximum of half what the drift would have been if you had synced the head (instead of the middle). For music, the 12 minute thing is a super buzzkill. For longer continuous video recording I used to just sync the head, then stretch/shrink the entire clip (from the tail side) such that I found sync at the end -- at that point the entire tape would have perfect sync. But those easy days are gone with the 12 minute limit of the 5D2. Oh well, the footage is so good, I just suck it up, lol...