Comments

PossibilityX wrote on 3/29/2005, 4:07 PM
Ruby, I'm no genius in this regard. I'm sure you'll get other, probably better, suggestions.

But what I'd do is drop your video, with its soundtrack (assuming it has one) on the timeline. Then drop your DAT audio on another audio track below the audio captured by the camcorder. From there you can expand the timeline and look for similarities in the waveforms. Nudge the DAT track back or forth by selecting it and hitting the left or right arrows on the number keypad. Play a few seconds of audio and listen to see if the two tracks are in synch. Nudge the DAT track forward or back in time to sync things up.

If you have no audio except the DAT stuff, drop it in an audio track below your video and look for obvious visual cues that would have a correspondingly obvious spike in the audio waveform---a cymbal crash, a hand clap, a foot stomp, or something like that.

Sorry this isn't more precise, but it worked for me. I did my first two-camera shoot in December of last year and found it pretty easy to match the audio tracks from the two cameras using this method. Then I discarded the lesser of the two audio tracks and worked with the good track.
RubyTuesday wrote on 3/29/2005, 4:37 PM
Thank you for your suggestion. Does anyone have any other ideas? I do have the camera audio and I did use a slate. Is there another, more time-efficient way of synching the DAT sound to my video? Thank you.
Rednroll wrote on 3/29/2005, 5:46 PM
The previous suggestion is probably one of the best method. Using the same general concept you can do this. The camera recording will be on audio Track#1, then record the audio from the DAT on Track#2. If the audio from the camera and DAT recording both have an audio slate, then you can just zoom into the front of both recordings where the slate starts and slide Track#2's audio around until the slates line up. When you got the two tracks playing the slates together, then mute track #1.
Orcatek wrote on 3/29/2005, 5:58 PM
Also a tail slate helps. If there are any time problems with your DAT audio, then you can stretch or contract your audio if needed. In theory this shouldn't happen, but the tail slate will give you peace of mind if nothing else.

RubyTuesday wrote on 3/29/2005, 8:22 PM
Thanks! I appreciate the help. I'll try 'em all.