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Filed under: Editing •Post Production •Software •

Automagic part I: PluralEyes autosyncing software

One of the first updates was the Level audio command which is very important to music video work since the camera can often vary at the distance from which it is to the audio source. Use markers is an option that might at first seem to defeat the purpose of an auto-syncing program because if you are going to take time to place markers then why not go ahead and sync by those markers? You don’t have to be as exact when placing the PluralEyes markers as you do when manually syncing so they can be added quickly. Finally there is the nicely named “Try really hard.” With this option checked PluralEyes does some extra processing in an attempt to better sync problem clips. This “Try really hard” option was the magic fairy dust that made PluralEyes sync the more problematic music videos. They claim an extra 5-10 times as long when processing with “Try really hard.” If I have the time and there is any hint that the audio is problematic I will use this option. If there’s a ton of takes, as if often the case on a music video, I let it process over lunch or at night. It works well and is worth the extra time if I have any doubt. Clips are in chronological order doesn’t have as much use in music video editing as you don’t usually have camera starts and stops as you do with long concert recording.

PluralEyes will also make a multiclip of your takes as well. This saves yet another step in the music video edit process. If you don’t use multiclips then it’s worth a try as the old fashioned multilayer clip stack can get unwieldy very fast when you have 20 - 30 + takes.

Room for improvement?

How can PluralEyes be improved? It’s a little strange that you have to name the sequence to be synced “pluraleyes.” It would be nice if PluralEyes gave you the option to specify which sequence to sync when you hit the Sync button. But that’s just a minor thing. It would also be nice if you didn’t have to stack the clips on different video layers. While that’s not a difficult task it can take quite some time with 20 - 30 + takes of a music video. If you could select all the takes and drag them into a timeline at once, which would put them in the order from your bin on track V1, and have PluralEyes do the stacking of the clips as part of its operation that would be a nice timesaver as well.

The other downside of an automagic tool like PluralEyes is it might be an excuse to become lazy with shooting and not plan properly. It can almost eliminate the need for a smart-slate and the traditional audio master slating on a music video shoot. As long as you have quality playback and are sure you are recording scratch audio then you can sync with PluralEyes. That is provided you are using Final Cut Pro which is the only support app at this writing though Sony Vegas support has been announced. As I said before I hope Avid Media Composer isn’t far behind as there’s a lot of music videos in the world cut on Avid. If you could send a line out of the audio playback directly to the line in of your camera then you could eliminate the problem audio as discussed above and really make syncing easy. Shooting film? Just use that smart-slate to sync during telecine and you can use PluralEyes with film as well.

As for the future of PluralEyes ... as I said, I hope that it does come to Avid Media Composer. Given Apple’s history of buying cool post-production tools it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was purchased and folded into Final Cut Studio. I really hope this doesn’t happen as that would deprive editors using other apps from working with such a useful tool.

I’ll close with a couple of illustrations of how well this little app automagically works. I was asked to edit a music video but at the last moment I didn’t have time. I wanted to help the director meet his deadline so I ran the takes through PluralEyes as fast as I could. When it finished performing it’s operation I noticed it had created several sequences. I didn’t have time to examine the results so I passed the hard drive over to the director. I learned later there were two different versions of the song that was performed. PluralEyes recognized this and created different sequences for each version.

On another recent video the production had used a proper smart-slate for syncing but out of curiosity I wondered how close PluralEyes would get the sync to the smart-slate. I ran the clips through PluralEyes and it placed all of the clips within nearly a single frame of the smart-slate if not right on. Considering how it does its operation I thought that was pretty damn good. Automagic indeed.

Coming soon: Automagic Part II: mocha for Final Cut and how it helped a non-visual effects editor (that would be me) track and replace license plates

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