Need to sync? Then a PluralEyes vs Syncaila audio waveform syncing shootout might interest you. The task of syncing audio and video for editing is not very much fun. So, a little bit of testing means I might as well write about PluralEyes vs. Syncalia when it comes to third-party waveform syncing applications. 

PluralEyes is the stalwart of waveform syncing apps that arrived around 2009. I still remember being marveled by what it could do at a small booth at NAB when creator Bruce Sharpe demoed it to me. I think I wrote one of the first detailed pieces about PluralEyes right here on PVC. Avid support was eventually added (but later removed), version 3 added new tools, Red Giant bought it, version 4 updated the interface and now Maxon has killed it. PluralEyes has synced hundreds of thousands of hours of media over the years, many of them by me. It has truly earned its status as legendary post-production software. 

Syncalia is the new kid on the block when it comes to waveform syncing, but it’s not that new at around five years old. It’s a relatively simple stand-alone app that takes an XML in, syncs it and then exports an in-sync XML back out. You then take that XML into your NLE.

Both have a few options for how to handle the media and the sync. 

Testing methodology

You may be asking why you need a third-party waveform syncing tool (that you have to pay for) when there is waveform syncing built into all of the current non-linear editing applications (that you are currently paying for). 

There are several reasons:

1. You want to sync clips but not necessarily make them into mulitcam clips.
2. You want to sync large batches of possibly unrelated media, such as a full day’s shoot.
3. You want to replace the camera audio with better secondary sound.
4. Your audio is of questionable quality.
5. You’re honestly unsure of exactly what you’re syncing, so you want to throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.

Some of those above scenarios are places where your NLE’s built-in waveform syncing often fails. 

For this comparison, I took a full day of shooting for a documentary and attempted a waveform sync. This includes the primary camera, a B camera that is sometimes rolled as a multi-camera shoot and sometimes rolled on its own, as well as secondary sound recorded to an external audio device. 

There was no timecode. I mean, the cameras recorded timecode, but they weren’t jam-synced to each other.

There were both some sit-down interviews as well as roving cameras shooting an event. Often, the audio was recorded with a boom mic. Sometimes, the ambient audio was really loud. 

This testing was done with Adobe Premiere Pro. While the syncing methods and sync accuracy happen in the individual syncing apps, you could use these tools with almost any NLE. There are a few Premiere things I make note of below.

All the raw footage was tossed, unsynced into a timeline. The A-cam was on video track 1, the B-cam on track 2 and the secondary audio in audio tracks below. It was a 3.5 hour-long timeline with over 7 hours of media.

This is how you have to set up for a third-party syncing operation. By tossing all the elements into a single timeline with different cameras on each track, you give the syncing tools a good place to begin.

PluralEyes

First things first, yes, I know that PluralEyes has gone into limited maintenance mode, meaning that it is no longer being updated. I wrote a Fare-thee-well PluralEyes – you were truly revolutionary article back when this was announced, and I vehemently disagree with Maxon’s reasoning behind killing PE. I think it’s because Maxon is a VFX company, and PluralEyes is an editing workflow tool. It’s really a sad thing, as there are still many use cases for PluralEyes (noted above), so it’s a real shame Maxon doesn’t keep developing it. 

Anyhoo…

PluralEyes is unique here with Adobe Premiere Pro in that there is an Extension that allows you to sync a timeline without ever leaving Premiere. It uses the PluralEyes engine but saves a lot of time. The extension will export an XML out and import a synced XML back in, saving the editor the headache of manual setup in another application.

PluralEyes does have a few nice settings to help with its sync operation.

It’s useful to be able to take a quick glance at your synced timeline and see what PluralEyes thinks is in sync and what it could not sync at all.

How long did the PluralEyes sync take? Total sync time: 4:24 (3:00ish to prepare)

And what does that timeline look like upon sync completion?

A quick look at the PluralEyes sync, I can see a few things. PE was able to sync most everything from the day. I only see a few places where it appears there were two cameras running, and that seems about right, as there were only 3 or 4 interviews that day.

A spot check of the returned sync (and you have to spot-check it, of course, for accuracy) reveals success.

And you can’t speak of PluralEyes without a look at it doing its thing.

Syncalia

Syncaila has been around for five or six years, but I often find a lot of editors don’t know about it. According to the app’s creator, Syncaila is “smart and stable enough to synchronize multiple-hour-long sequences with many different cameras and recorders” which makes it ideal for documentary and unscripted work when there is no timecode to sync with. 

If you can get an XML out of your NLE you can import that into Syncaila for syncing.

There are a few sync settings before you hit the sync buttons in Syncaila.

How long did the Syncaila sync take? Total sync time: 6:11 (4:27 to prepare and analyze)

To get your Syncaila sync back to the NLE, you have to export a synced XML. So check your settings.

And what does that timeline look like upon sync completion?

A quick glance, and it looks pretty good overall. It’s not as tidy as the PluralEyes sync, but that’s because Syncaila did not put unsynced clips at the end.

Observations

There are a lot of things worth noting here and a number of things to consider if you are thinking of one tool over the other.

Both Syncaila and PluralEyes work via XML, so when you import the synced XML back into your Adobe Premiere Pro project, you might end up with a lot of duplicate clips.

Duplicate clips are very undesirable, but it’s a fact of life with XML and Premiere Pro at least. Some best practices can minimize the disruption.

• Sync first and do other things later.
• Attach proxies and tag metadata after syncing, as you may lose those operations in the XML exchange.
• The Audio and Video Usage metadata columns are helpful in identifying what clips go with what sequence in the event of duplicate clips.
• Premiere’s Consolidate Duplicates command is pretty much worthless in this context, as something about clips coming in via the XML means they are totally different clips to Premiere. At least most of the time.
• Upon the import of a synced XML, all of the newly imported elements will be highlighted, so immediately drag them to the bin icon to put them in their own bin.

PluralEyes could sometimes import the synced XML and not duplicate all the clips and not lose existing metadata

I will often tag a lot of media with metadata like shoot date, offload numbers and things like that using Kyno (oh, beloved Kyno) and Kyno’s workflow to get that media into Premiere. Usually, an XML exchange using that media will strip any added metadata, but not always in the case of PluralEyes.

Of note, this keeping of metadata was via the PluralEyes extension.

Syncaila was able to accurately sync a rather complex camera start/stop segment that PluralEyes was not.

Part of what I wanted to sync here was a basketball game. You can imagine how loud and unpredictable that could be for waveform syncing. While both tools were able to sync the long stretches of secondary audio to the A-camera, only Syncaila was able to sync the B-camera start/stops accurately.

I was surprised that PluralEyes didn’t get this sync, as I have had PE success in some seemingly impossible syncs over the years.

I will note that I sent a note to the developer of Syncaila a couple of weeks before this was published via the Report a problem menu, but I never heard a reply back. UPDATE: I did hear back from the developer but the reply went into my spam folder.

It’s also worth noting that Syncaila is getting updated as after I had done this sync job, I got an update a week or so later.

I am always very happy to see post-production tools getting updated.

And the winner is?

As far as doing what might be a desirable outcome, I think PluralEyes would be the winner with its speed, very useful Premiere extension and ability to keep metadata upon XML roundtrip.

But since Red Giant/Maxon has killed it as far as updates go, I have to go with Syncaila since it (hopefully) has a reliable future.

And Syncaila is affordable with a very flexible pricing model.

There are a lot of options there. I think I purchased a season pass a time or two before breaking down and buying the full license.

But seriously, how would the built-in waveform syncing in Adobe Premiere Pro handle this?

Okay, I suppose we could give this a try. Since you aren’t syncing by timecode, you can’t tell Premiere to keep each angle on its own track so you’ll get a lot of different mulicam clips. You can’t help PPro to know what goes where since the Create Multi-camera Source Sequence is really designed to work on smaller, targeted batches of clips, especially when syncing by waveform. But you do get something usable.

Premiere did a better job than I expected when selecting all clips from the day and telling it to sync them into a multicam by waveform. And it did what it did quickly in about one minute and 45 seconds.

PPro was able to get a lot of the basketball synced to the secondary audio. And it got the 2-camera interviews right. You’d have to do some manual sorting to make sense of what it did and didn’t do, but you need to do that with any sync tool when throwing a whole day at it all at once. But there is something really nice about seeing that sync map of the full day of footage.

PPro did not do as good of a job as Syncalia or PluralEyes, and you would have to extract the syncs from multicam clips if you didn’t want to use multicam clips.

Ok, but what about the other non-linear editors and their internal syncing?

DaVinci Resolve was able to do its waveform syncing into a mulitcam clip pretty quickly, but the result was a mess.

You can tell Resolve what clips come from what camera, but while you get the clips on fewer tracks, it seemed to do far worse with accuracy. These 49 layers have some clips in sync but are nowhere near as accurate as PluralEyes or Syncaila.

Final Cut Pro churned along trying to create a mulitcam clip for about 7 minutes and then returned this for what it was able to sync.

It’s a bit hard to see everything in context in this FCP Angle Editor. But it did do something.

Avid Media Composer hasn’t always had the ability to sync via waveform, but it does now. It took about 25 minutes to get the result below.

At least Avid put all the clips into its multicam sync attempt. I don’t think there was all that much in sync, but honestly, it was hard to know as it was almost impossible to sleuth it out.

But I didn’t expect the NLEs to be able to sync a full day of rushes the way Syncaila and PluralEyes can.

That’s important to note. When your NLE is going to try and sync clips for multicam editing, it is expecting way less than a full day of rushes. And it expects some kind of organization. That’s fine, but you can’t dismiss the usefulness of both Syncaila and PluralEyes being able to massively speed along the syncing of a day of rushes. THAT, Maxon, is why editors need dedicated, standalone syncing tools like Syncaila and PluralEyes.