Multiple Camera Obscura

When I hear the term “multicam” used in reference to a shoot I’m going to work on, I, like many video folk, am both thrilled and a little worried.

On the one hand, multiple cameras provide exponentially better coverage and lead to great, professional looking final pieces. However, in an edit, video synchronization can be a giant headache. Now, if you’re running master time code from a fancy outboard device to multiple cameras, that’s fantastic. You get to use terms like “black burst” and “global dropframe tc” and that’s just fun. But I don’t have that stuff, and so for the most part have had to line up my footage manually, which sucks. Ask anyone who has spent endless hours lining up clips ‘till their eyes bleed and they’ll say “For the love of Pete will someone give me a Kleenex to get this damn blood out of my eyes?! How gross is this?!” And then they’ll tell you that manually lining up clips to sync sucks.

Enter: “Pluraleyes” from Singular Software!

This software is designed to reduce the aforementioned eye-bleeding, which is a valiant goal if you ask me. Supposedly it’s practically a one-click operation. You have your Final Cut Pro project open, you run Pluraleyes, and click “Sync”. That’s exactly eleventy-billion fewer clicks than synchronizing the footage manually. Okay, fine, roughly eleventy billion fewer clicks. It was hard to keep an exact count with all that blood in my eyes.

This, I thought, is a product I need to try. It sounds like magic, but from what I understand, it actually works by analyzing and lining up the audio, so HD and SD actually take the same amount of time to analyze. Very clever. So I watched the tutorial and downloaded the free demo. But wait! I don’t have any multiple-camera projects at the moment! Drat! They provide some practice files, but I need to try this software out in a real world scenario. Hmmm. Where can I find real-world footage of a multiple camera shoot?

A couple of phone calls later I’m in possession of a 3-terabyte drive chock-full of multiple-camera coverage of a Lindy Hop competition. We editor-types, we’re thick as thieves, you know. Plus, we love showing each other what we’ve been working on. And since I was essentially offering to take care of synchronizing a multiple camera shoot for them, our mystery editor was happy to loan me the footage. Okay, one hurdle hurdled. Now, let’s put this puppy to the test.

I loaded up the project. Gosh, the Lindy Hop looks neat. Seriously. Watch this. Okay, let’s put some clips on the timeline, in a sequence called “Pluraleyes” like the tutorial said. All-righty. Now let’s click that button!

Drat!




Okay, no in or out points allowed. Gotcha. Let’s see if I can remove that… Yep. Take two! One easy click and…

Drat!!

Uh oh. “There was an error getting the project information”. Hmmm. To the forums!

Let’s look up my error. There it is. What do we have here?

“Sometimes FCP will have a problem in communicating the project information to PluralEyes. The latest version works around some of these issues and it now gives an error message when it can’t. When can FCP have this problem? In one case, it was caused by the clip being acquired in a third-party program that left some erroneous characters in the project data.”

Well, what did I expect. I was hoping for a simple magical solution to a complex real-world problem. And apparently in most cases this actually works like that. It is absolutely worth a shot. Plus, it was just released in April (we’re talking version 1.0 here) so they are sure to address these issues soon. But in this particular case, I’m stuck with the fact that I told that guy I’d line up all of his multiple camera clips.

Drat again!!! I guess it’s off to grab a box of Kleenex. I’m going to have some bleeding eyes to tend to.