Audio Solution for "could not synchronize one or more clips" PP 13.1

[Vadim Cherny]

Hi, I ran into this problem today and went looking for this "Could not synchronize one or more clips in the current selection because a match could not be found" error on the internet. After spending half a night and a break in a bunch of forums, I never found the answer.

After that, I just sat down and began to think logically why this could happen in Premiere Pro. And I found the answer, my education as a sound engineer helped in this.

So, here are my sources: a live music video filmed with 5 cameras at the same time and an audio master file of the track of this clip with mastering! (those who understand sound know that in pursuit of loudness, the waveforms of modern music tracks are most often monolithic "bricks").

So, having synchronized the cameras with the sound using Premiere and replacing the bad sound from the camera with a clean "brick" on each camera, I tried to create a multicamera using the Create multicam source sequence ... But whatever I did, this error constantly appeared Could not synchronize...

And when I returned the original sounds from the cameras, not overloaded by the limiter, instead of the "bricks" - then the synchronization of the multicamera went perfectly!

Conclusion!

Premiere Pro's own synchronization algorithms are far from being as good as those of the same PluralEyes - during synchronization, Premiere tries to match audio files by waveforms and peaks on them, and when instead of a waveform it analyzes a "perfect brick" - it simply cannot with which to compare the waveform. The same applies to badly recorded, overloaded tracks from cameras: if the limiter built into the camera severely cuts the input sound, Premiere will also have difficulty analyzing such a waveform, so synchronization will end with an error.
Don't overdrive your original audio, write at the recommended volume settings, and give Premiere a clean waveform (and less extraneous noise during recording, of course) - and you'll be fine with sync.

Sincerely, Vadim.

[Moderator note: moved to Ideas due to content of post.]

[R Neil Haugen]

Vadim,

Great post! That answers a lot of questions ... "we" users here have figured out that you need to have a decently strong signal, and fairly close between tracks for overall "loudness" to get a match.

But that additional info about the reason it can't get the music tracks ... because of as you note, the "brick" loudness waveforms ... that's something I know I've never thought of!

And that could use some love & attention from the audio devs, to get that functioning better.

So ... @DurinG  are you around to see this?

Neil

[R Neil Haugen]

Or @Matt_Stegner ?

[Vadim Cherny]

Just simple example: there are two walls - one is green, the other is blue. How can you tell them apart if you are blind?

[Baffy19]

@Vadim Cherny I'll add more. Premiere does not synchronize the sound recorded on the Hollyland transmitters placed at two speakers, where the sound of one is written to the left stereo channel with good sound, to the right - with low sound quality. In the second, on the contrary, a good sound is written to the right channel, and to the left - with low sound quality. It syncs a couple of clips when creating a multi-camera. The rest writes failed to create matches. I suspect that the problem should be looked for in the Hollyland recording setup. But how to record sound correctly?

[mickf65729623]

Useless Premiere pro also cannot sync decent levelled scratch audio with clean master audio if the two are different sample rates (literally the definition of scratch vs master audio). It has been an open secret for years that Adobe has had ZERO interest improving this stone age audio algorithm. I could hire 5 year olds to match waveforms better than adobe can. “Which mountain looks the same as that one junior?”