Synchronisation of multiple clips in timelime

[Richard van den Boogaard]

Maxon, after acquiring the assets of former Red Giant Software, on 1st of Febuary 2023 announced that they were entering PluralEyes in Limited Maintenance Mode, meaning that the company will continue to provide technical support and critical bug fixes for PluralEyes 2023.0.0 for one year after this announcement.

Of course, the key benefit of using PluralEyes over the Synchronise feature inside PPro was that you could have multiple audio and video clips thrown onto a single timeline and let the software synchronise clips automatically, based on the audio portion, so you could have crisp audio from a single camera attached to a properly placed mic matched to that of other cameras that only recorded audio in-camera or with an on-board shotgun mic. With Synchronise inside PPro you can only do this with one take at a time, not a full day's worth of takes on a single timeline.

For this reason, PluralEyes used to be my go-to solution for synchronisation based on audio.

Please Adobe, can you look into expanding this functionality of the Synchronise feature so that in a year's time, we won't miss the PluralEyes plugin?

Thanks.

[Edited for clarity: this needs to include putting all clips our of one camera on one track, rather than the current Premiere behavior of putting each successive segment on a higher video track.]

[smrpix]

Yes, the ability to make sync maps simply within Premiere would be great. 

PluralEyes' ability to do that, plus their drift correction have been huge timesavers.  Of course, it still works -- for now.

[Richard van den Boogaard]

Yes, PluralEyes was one of my most used Plugins from Red Giant.

[R Neil Haugen]

PluralEyes is now officially listed as heading for EOL?

Wow ... um ... ouch.

Although PluralEyes is a better tool for some things, I'm puzzled by something in your comment. You say you can't batch Sync in Premiere, but actually, the Multicam process does batch work pretty decently.

In Premiere, at this time, one can select say an entire bin of clips in the Project panel, say you've got 12 clips of video with camera sound, each with also a separate audio-only file. With all clips in the bin selected, tell Pr to make multi-cam sequences.

If say four of the video/sound clips are from an interview from different cameras, a couple are from a different interview, and the rest are one-cam only interviews ... Premiere will sort that out so you'll have that four-cam interview as one MC, the two cam as another MC, and the other six video files as individual MCs but synced with their audio.

All in the Project panel, all as sequences or clips as you wish. That isn't workable?

Neil

[smrpix]

@Neil,  Yes, you can batch muliple clips, but they all go on their own video/audio track and it starts to get unruly.  I end up sliding things up and down manually so the multicam doesn't have dozens of windows. That part could be made more elegant. (Even in Avid you can put all your camera A on one track, all your camera B on another, hit make group and they mostly stay put.)

Having pondered this PluralEyes thing for a couple of days my semi-educated guess is this:  they will introduce a revamped version in a few months with some new features that will "justify" a big price hike for current users, or just incorporate it it into one or more of their overpriced suites.

[R Neil Haugen]

Good points about the track thing. That's one area that PluralEyes always has done better, putting all of Cam X on a certain track even if the files are "discontinuous".

In Premiere, if Cam X shoots a while, stops, shoots again later while the entire shoot on at least one cam plus audio goes on ... Premiere parks that next bit on a higher track. Which isn't what I think anyone would ever want.

That needs changing in Premiere.

Neil

[Richard van den Boogaard]

Or: Maxon could decide that audio is not in their primary interest altogether and they focus on visual fx plugins...

[R Neil Haugen]

Yea, there's that, isn't there?

Well ... this is why pushing on the Pr devs to up it's native multicam processes is maybe even more needed than before ...

Neil

[Richard van den Boogaard]

ProVideo Coalition has also devoted a post to this matter: https://www.provideocoalition.com/fare-thee-well-pluraleyes-you-were-truly-revolutionary/

Hopefully, engineers at Adobe will read this. Perhaps you can help bring it to their attention @Kevin-Monahan?