Thanks
That's the one I remembered.
Maybe I oughta step up to Pro.....

WSS

Zooming in on the timeline and using the waveform in the audio track to sync the tracks is very easy and quick. I do 4 cam shoots and do it this way.

Sure, Pro would be easier, but with VMS10's added tracks, I can "get by" with VMS for now.

I'm not sure how much faster it could be.

I can sync 4 tracks visually by the waveform, line up the beginnings and adjust for drift at the end, all manually in less than a minute. Way less. Of course, that's assuming that all four tracks are somewhat close to the same start time. If one of the tracks starts "oh, somewhere between 10 and 40 minutes after the others", then it's a little more time consuming.

Most of my shoots are with a digital audio recorder for "dual system sound". As others have said .. syncing visually isn't really all that hard.

Well I have recorded an audio track for a concert with a Zoom H4 and had enough drift to need to realign every two oe three songs.
WSS

That's the case with my H4. The newer H4n has much less appreciable drift, and will often go an hour or more without correction. But I'm waiting to see how the Q3HD plays out before making another purchase.

Some people like to timestretch / squeeze the 2nd audio track, I like to chop mine into ~10 min. chunks, splitting at quiet spots exactly at zero crossings, and aligning each chunk individually. You may want to do this song-by-song.

Pluraleyes in Vegas Pro makes it much easier.

The reason i will only do this through timestretch/squeeze is so that it will bring the other track back to the same pitch as the primary one.

Say you've recorded 60 minutes of audio. The primary source produces a track 60 minutes long while the secondary one is 63 minutes 35 seconds long. It will be longer because the secondary device recorded at a pitch 6% too fast, and then it gets added to the project as if the pitch wasn't too fast. Vegas therefore plays it back 6% too slow. As part of it being slower, the pitch has also dropped 1 semitone. Simply chopping it up and removing some bits to bring it back to 60 minutes doesn't correct the pitch change. Timesqueezing it fixes both problems.

You do have to tell Vegas to not preserve pitch by locking pitch to stretch for this to work.

Well I have recorded an audio track for a concert with a Zoom H4

That info would have been helpful in your original post.

I recently acquired a Zoom H1 to add to the arsenal. So that's a great tip since I've noted the time drift.

Bill

6% per hour is a huge amount of drift, and if I encountered a device that was that far off (syncing analogue tape to video?), I would make an emergency pitch correction first.

Using the first-generation H4, the largest drift I have encountered on the job has been <=22ms/hr of material, and usually less than that. That is about the same effect as moving an additional 25 feet from the audio source. Fortunately, the pitch shift (.0006 cents) is undetectable to me (but the echo is). So I stick with the cut-and-align approach, being very careful where I split my secondary audio. I will also be very interested in testing the elastique' time stretch to see how much better it is in reducing Q-noise and flanging, which is why I generally avoid the timestretch method in the first place.

Kelly and I have discussed the two approaches before, and I agree that there are advantages and drawbacks to either method, which become magnified the more drift that is involved.

I brought this subject up once with Bruce at Pluraleyes, and they are exploring a dynamic approach to the drift issue that should make either of these methods obsolete at some point in the future.

I recently acquired a Zoom H1 to add to the arsenal. So that's a great tip since I've noted the time drift.

I'm also considering getting an H1. I'd hate to think that I'll have to deal with the time drift.

Are you recording at 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz? I thought you wouldn't have to deal with it (as much) if using 48 kHz. I know that's samples per second so prolly nothing to do with syncing.

>>Are you recording at 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz? I thought you wouldn't have to deal with it (as much) if using 48 kHz. I know that's samples per second so prolly nothing to do with syncing.

Recording at 48 kHz.

Bill