How to Sync footage from one camera tape and focus hard-drive clips from other camera
 

Hello,

We filmed an event using 2 cameras, we are only going to be able to use a point form audio from the 2 cameras to try to sync the footage. The thing is I (besides tape) I was using a Focus hard-drive, the other camera only tapes.

This was a 2+long hour event in which cameras recorded non-stop, we had to change tapes twice. The thing is we want to only sync twice (since we change tape 2 times), but since I was using a Focus hard-drive to avoid all the pain of having to import footage from the tapes I would like to use the video from the hard-drive.

I was shocked to find no corrupted files from Focus, as in the past (not long ago, is a brand new Focus) there was always some corrupted files, so this is good news...the thing is tha instead of finding one single file, I find 14 clip files, most of them (exept 2) are 2 Gigs, this is possible due to the disk being formatted in Fat32, should be formatted in NTFS to avoid clips being 2Gigs tops, right?

Well nothing I can do now, but is there a way to sync this clips and the tape from the other camera and not go crazy in the work??? To put it simple, what would you do to solve this problem?

Thanks for the help

Jose ...

If your hard drive has split the recording into 2 gig FAT32 chunks then you should be able to re-assemble them in your NLE with no breaks in the timecode, giving you a clean timeline to which you can synchronise your 3 camera clips. Its quite easy to synchronise clips accurately just by listening to the audio tracks and nudging the clips left or right until you eliminate any echo or delay effects. The clips from the second camera should stay in synch all the way to the end.

However if your hard drive clips have gaps in the timecode then you have a problem - you then have to synchronise the hard drive clips to the clips from the second camera to maintain a continous unbroken timeline, which is a little more time-consuming but still possible. You have a real problem if you have breaks in the timecode of your hard drive recording that occur during your tape changes - there is no way around this.

I regularly record 2+ hour shows using 2 HDV cameras and have to capture and sync 6 tapes in order to do a multicam edit. This is why I'm currently experimenting with recording one or both HDV streams directly to a laptop.

Good luck

Tony

Hello Tony,

You're right! I put the clips one after another and there's no break in them...only in the time I changed tapes. So now things will be a little easier, thank God!

Now the problem will be making the clips from diferent brand cameras (Canon and Sony) look similar...but thats another thing.

Thanks for the info.

Tomy