Premiere Pro Multicam synchronization kinda sucks...

[AndrewTheGreat]

Hi. My friend asked me to see into a case of Premiere Pro refusing to synchronize his recent shooting of a person playing the guitar and singing a song. There are 3 cameras - all the three recording the sound onto their built-in mics plus an external high-quality microphone pointed at the preson. The guy plays the accoustic guitar (the music audiowave) and sings (this makes the music plus vocals audiowave). Everything was shot in a studio so there are no external or parasitic noises. The task Premiere Pro should cope with - but it failed. So we tried to create a Multicamera sequense using ordinary settings and then experimenting with them and in all cases Premiere Pro gives a window with a "Could not synchronize all the clips" message and creates several multicam sequences the first three being some short part of the whole shooting but with synchronized 2-4 tracks (though all the three cameras were shooting almost all the time), and the last one being a mess of more than 30 tracks (see the screenshot)

Having struggled with the problem for around two hours I decided to try Plural Eyes 4 and it did the job perfectly. Without a scratch! And even faster! See the screenshot too - every single clip is layered as if it was done by a professional builder layering bricks. So what I am trying to say is that Premiere Pro built-in synchronization works fine only with simple 2-camera short footage with a clear sound, I suppose, but for anything television-like with multiple cameras it really sucks and really needs improvements. I'm not even speaking about the "user friendliness" of such a feature, where you cannot just select all the clips in your bin, hit "Sync" and get the result - you always have to make additional time-consuming actions and even then - as my example shows - it may not work. In Plural Eyes you import the footage as a whole, wait for the waveforms to build and hit Sync. That is all. Hope Premiere Pro will get to it one day.

[R Neil Haugen]

Premiere doesn't handle 'breaks' well ... if say cameras are turned on and off, so they're on part of the time ... Premiere will make a new 'cam' and track each instance. Which yea, can be a pain.

Another issue, and could be a big part of what you're dealing with on this job, is ... gain.

Premiere will do a pretty good job syncing multicam if the relative track levels are similar. If one file is say 12dB below the others ... maybe not so much. So I typically grab the clips in the bin, and before tellling it to create multicam, do a normalize all max peaks to X ... and tben the multicam just works.

That might help some, but where the cameras are on/off/on ... that's gonna be a bit of cleanup work. And yea, we all wish this was better ... just trying to get some practical information so you can get through this job a bit less painfully.

[AndrewTheGreat]

Thanks for the reply. Well as far as I can see the waveforms are alright, the gain is quite high because all the cameras were practically at the same distance from the person, the sound overall is good, besides even if it was too low sometimes, there are parts within clips where the guitar just shines so it gives a reference point to synchronization of the whole clip. As for the clips being cut off with the camera STOP button instead of recording continuously - this makes sense although I had now idea or understanding how this can even be a problem for such a harvester as Premiere Pro... By the way the clips are not numerous - there are 3 folders (each for a camera) with only 19 clips in each so although in total this makes 57 clips - they are all only 19 for each camera.