jpsound

No, not yet. Any good suggestions? Thanks!

Again, thanks everyone for some good suggestions. Nick, I'll take a look at EdiLoad and see if that can help us out. I'm happy to hear that Christian says that this workflow is appearing elsewhere... perhaps down the road there will be a single editing solution or workflow that solves all the problems we're having. Although I have what I need, I'll try to clarify once more for Craig and Marc solely for their understanding. Let's first consider how things are done in a recording studio, so let's say Marc is our singer and Craig is our engineer. Marc is going to lay down a few base takes of his hit new single. These takes are continuous from the start of his song to the end. Then, because maybe his throat got dry in measure 25, he wants to re-record that measure and comp it in. So he does. And maybe he comps a few more measures, too. In the end, Craig bounces out a mix that is not just composed of the base take but also a bunch of comps - but together they add up to one full song. In the audio-only world this is pretty easy. When Marc wants to go back and re-sing measure 25, Craig recalls the transport to measure 24 or so, hits record, and then crossfades the in and the out. Simple. But how do you do this when you're also rolling video? You can't, because you just don't capture video into a 'comp' like you would audio. Instead, PT and cameras are rolling quasi-continuously through the entire session, and a producer sits there with notes to say "Let's go back to measure 25". Marc goes back and sings measure 25, which is not captured over the original base take but instead somewhere farther along in the audio and video files. During all this, Marc's job doesn't get harder; he just sings when the producer or Craig tells him to. Craig's job actually gets easier, because he doesn't have to move the audio transport around as much. My job, as editor, gets much harder. After the session, Craig follows the producers notes and splices all the comps into the base take. In our example, he would take the audio at "Measure 25 Take 1" and move it to overlap measure 25 in the base take. That comp, which originally was in time with the video (even assuming timecode and tri-level sync for everything), has now been shifted somewhere else in the PT timeline. So without a better solution, I sit there in FCPx scrubbing through until I find the video that was recorded during "Measure 25 Take 1" and then dragging it so it aligns with where the audio for that take is mixed. That's the issue we're having. I'm not sure if I can be more clear than that.

In response to Craig: Yeah, that's the way to do it only if audio and video is one long take. For us, it's not. Also, we're dealing with a broadcast mix in a lot less clunky way than using Auxes in PT. In response to Marc: Someone at some point made the assumption that we're shooting on cameras with no TC. That's not true, so getting past that part isn't a problem. There are some people at my workplace that are in fact scared of TC, but I'm not. Instead, I'm trying to streamline our editing process, which even though is backwards from the industry (audio before video), is necessary for our productions. And finally, for Jay: We have an editor that has gotten good at linking the video back to the audio, and our method currently works pretty well for him. It just takes a while, especially because we sometimes are editing audio down to a specific note. We want to make the process faster and more accessible for future editors who come in without knowing how we do things. Long story short, WORKFLOW TEST! Again, thanks for the help and interesting discussion.

Alright! We're off to a good start here with the comments we've gotten so far. I think the most promising might be AuxTC Reader, so we'll put that on our list of things to test. Thanks everyone for your help. A few more comments: I'm just interested in what others are using - Phillip, what recording system are you using? Something like Boom Recorder or Metacorder with a TC input? Or something else? Also, Yeah, we know it's weird. The world class musicians we're recording care more about how they sound than how they look. It may not be legitimate to you, but our clients beg to differ.

Hey everyone, I work for a university production studio where we specialize in multitrack audio recording and offer multi camera video capture. I say it in this way because, unlike film, we lock an edit in the audio realm before its sent to the video editing folks. With our current workflow the video editors have to spend a good deal of time manually realigning takes of video to the audio mix before the creative editing process can take place. Currently we record, edit, and mix our audio in Protools 11 and edit video in FinalCut Pro X. Each of the video cameras captures onto a separate SxS card and timecode and genlock are not distributed throughout the studio. For some reason we haven't run into video sync issues for a few years now, so I consider ourselves lucky that we have’t had more problems. The audio edits come from several non-contiguous takes over the course of a production. The video editors then have to go back through, reference the Protools session, and scrub through to find the corresponding sections of video in FCP X. Each take is slated manually, but often the audio edits come from relatively small sections within the take. We’re trying to find a better solution: 1. To automatically reassemble the video to match the audio edits, or 2. That would allow us to edit the video and audio simultaneously. Keep in mind that when we edit audio we have up to 48 channels and need similar editing power as Protools. If you're unfamiliar with Protools, the reason this won’t work immediately with timecode between PT and the cameras is because the timeline treats timecode as relative for each clip. For example, if a clip is recorded at 00:02:18:14 and moved in the timeline during editing, the clip’s timecode stamp when exported will be its new position in the timeline. So we cant use the clip’s timecode to line it up with the original video because it will be incorrect. I know this is a long question with a lot of conditions, but our workflow is somewhere between broadcast and film, and due to the nature of the material we record, audio takes precedence over video. It’s a unique situation. I’m looking for any comments or suggestions regarding how we can improve our workflow, including the addition of equipment / timecode / sync / software / etc… and wondering if there are any other studios out there with a similar production goal.