Help! How to sync poly WAV files to video?

Report · Dec 16, 2022

Editing in Premiere and my sound guy gave me poly WAV files, whic I now need to sync using the scratch track from my camera (Zcam E2 S6).

Pulled the (poly) .wav files into the Premiere timeline, which revealed all but one of the indivividual tracks (weird, I can see all 5 tracks in modify->audio channels but only 4 appear in the Timeline). Anyway, Premiere won't sync in timeline ("Synchronize" greys out) because some clips share tracks. There are a LOT of clips -- so creating a new track for each manually isn't feasible.

Tried PluralEyes both inside Premiere and stand alone, exporting .xml each time, including a timeline with original camera audio replaced (not that that would matter). PluralEyes inside Premiere resulted in overlapping video and audio clips, a mess. PluralEyes stand alone exported multiple audio tracks, but all appeared to be duplicates, and ONLY Track 1 played -- which I assume is the MONO Mix he recorded on the first track of the polywave. Looking back at the stand-alone "sync'd" PluralEyes project timeline for clues, I noticed there is only one audio clip sync'd to each video clip (which I assume is its poly WAV) shown as a single clip.

My question: What's the Adobe workflow to sync polyWAV files to video? Maybe pull them into an audio program and export separate mono track files, then import into (PluralEyes?), sync and export .xml to Premiere? I would assume I'll run into the "same track" issue in Premiere if I try it natively...

Also -- I don't think this should complicated thigns much once I have the amaswer abovee -- I have another project with polywave files and multiple cameras -- but I think nsyncing those once I know how to deal with the PW files should be pretty straightforward.

I owe the project soon so have to get this solved asap... Thanks!

Report · Dec 22, 2022

I can't help with PluralEyes, it is not made by Adobe.

For Syncing, each channel of the wave file needs to be on its own track, as Premiere will not move clips to a new track. This includes the scratch track. By default a wave file will do this in Premiere if it has 5 channels like you describe.

This is quite a large topic, so I'll include a pretty good tutorial on how the various ways to synchronize audio in Premiere: https://youtu.be/XB_tb6MRdAI

Each section that needs to be sycned should also probably be created as a separate sequence and then nested, or one sequence that is just the synced audio that is then used to cut into the main sequence.