Premiere Pro CC Multicam help!

[Clive McLaughlin]

Trying to switch from Vegas to Premiere here, and I was hoping one weekend would have me up to speed. Sadly not.


I've three camera tracks, and two more separate audio tracks. Following official tutorials and 'Create Multicam Sequence', fails miserably. I'm asking for it to sync audio, and all video has audio.

But after it runs, it tells me it could not sync 'some of the clips'.

Upon inspection, its a LOT of the clips. In fact, the footage from my 6D, and the footage from my CX730s don't want to know each other!

Surely the waveforms would be similar enough from the same room to workout?

I even transcoded by 6D footage to see if it would help but sadly still no.

I can't get MPEG Streamclip to accept my CX730 files, so can't transcode them.

Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?

[Steve Bleasdale]

Clive make sure the audio is all on a seperate track! one two three four five. Make sure there are no effects added at all to clips! Make sure there are no duplicate clips on same track. Steve

[Nigel Barker]

How it works in PP may have changed as I haven't looked at this in a long while but when audio synch first came out in CC I tried it & found it lacking. Specifically it seemed designed to synch only an audio track to a single video track & not a whole bunch of video clips from multiple cameras. I reverted to PluralEyes which really is designed to synch up a load of disparate clips from different sources & normally does an outstanding job.

[Clive McLaughlin]

Thanks guys - yea Nigel, I read too that there were issues - but also read that the updated versions had fixed the issues.

Pretty disappointed with this. Its been a standard on Final Cut for a while now I understand. Part of my reason for moving to Premiere Pro CC was in order to have less third party plugins involved.

[Andrew Kimery]

Clive,

In the Create Multi-camera Source Sequence dialog box do you have Track Channel set to "mix down"?

I've synced dozens of interviews and walk-n-talks for my current project with probably 99% accuracy using PPro 7 (2-3 cameras plus up to 4 channels of out board audio).

[Clive McLaughlin]

Hey Andrew, tried 'mix down'. Made no difference. I'm going to try transcoding the files from my CX730 to see if they are the issue. Mpeg Streamclip wouldn't accept them - are there any other decent converters out there I could try?

[Andrew Kimery]

Not to state the obvious, but have you tried Adobe Media Encoder?

[Clive McLaughlin]

Back to Vegas. Premiere Pro just gave me too many headaches, and everyday things I did in Vegas either weren't possible in Premiere, or required a longer process. Multicam syncing didn't work, and integration with Pluraleyes was 'glitchy'. I gave a week of my time to it - no more. Back to Vegas.

[Jeff Harper]

Clive, I'm with you. It was the doing of everyday things in PP that caused me to quit after a couple of days. It's a great program, I'm sure, but I learned to edit in Vegas and the simplest things in PP seemed to much more complicated and time consuming.

[Dave O'Melia]

This may help you http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-cr...c-ppro-cc.html

[Mark Whittle]

"a lot of the clips…."

How many angles are you trying to sync? Are there lots of short duration clips that you want it to sync up with a longer master angle? not sure how well it copes with that but I have had it work perfectly many times with three cameras running continuously plus an audio only file from an H2 or similar. When the cameras gets to their 4GB limit and create new clips, I don't include these in the clips I want to sync - just the first clip from each camera. You can manually add them to the multi clip timeline afterwards.

All three cameras are completely different: a Sony Z5 (1440x1080i HDV) a Lumix GH2 (1080i AVCHD) and GH3 (1080p50 MOV). It works. On my 2009 Mac Pro I sometimes have to reduce the playback resolution to half for smooth playback but it works great. WAY more flexible than FCP7. Never tried X.

[Kyle Root]

I just did my first multi-cam sync in PPCC a couple days ago. Still editing it - a wedding ceremony.

5 cameras - 2 Canon XF300s, 1 Sony NX5, 1 Canon XA20, and 1 Nikon V1.
1 external audio - Tascam DR05

There was also a GoPro that was in a housing that didn't get good audio of course. So, it wouldn't work with the audio sync in Premiere. I'm planning to go back and just add that one manually in a couple spots.

Working on a 3 year old custom built machine with i7 2600k, 16GB RAM, 240 GB SSD, and assorted 7200 RPM HDs. Playing back in real time fine so far, about 1/2 way through the 20 minute ceremony.

I normally do these brute force, by just putting each clip on it's on track usually "safest or widest with no movement" to "worst - pickup shots and B roll etc". Then edit by cutting out what is obviously bad and seeing what's left. LOL

[Clive McLaughlin]

Hi Mark, back on Vegas using Pluraleyes 3 yea I'm finding that a lot of my shorter clips are not syncing. Quite a lot of them are during periods of music or singing in the audio.Its only happened recently. Since buying a second CX730, I'm roaming around with my (then) Canon 6D using it to capture short beauty shots.

So, whilst I understand why the software is struggling, its pretty annoying. Because going through a f verse long hymn trying to manually match up a 3 second stray clip is almost not worth the effort.

I guess I will keep my camera shooting for a good few seconds after I'm happy with the shot to give the sync software more of a chance.

[Peter Riding]

I guess I will keep my camera shooting for a good few seconds after I'm happy with the shot to give the sync software more of a chance.

Thats what I do. Seldom does Pluraleyes let me down but the alternative can be so time-consuming that I'd rather have a few seconds of the cam pointing at the floor or bouncing around if that what it takes.

Pete

[Paul R Johnson]

I'm a bit mystified - I've been editing for quite a while and have never had a need to use plural eyes, or to be honest, the sync feature in PP CC - I've never needed it. The audio waveform, and the visual info are quite enough for me. It's rare there's not one random event that lets you slip and slide. I've always done it by ear and eye and don't really need the auto features.