Sync and Merge two audio files to a single video clip

cortex feature
1

We’ve had recent questions from @Anders_Y and @runningman regarding syncing multiple audio files to a single video file. Specifically when you need both audio files to span the length of the video file:

[ ---------- video file ----------]
[— au1 --][—au2 ------------]

The current solution is to duplicate and cut the video clip to sync to each audio file separately, resulting in two “takes” rather than one.

We’d be interested in additional feedback on how often this is encountered and what types of multi-sync/merge features would be useful.

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2

There are 3 possible work arounds for this currently:

  1. Just sync part 1, deliver part 2 as wild track and let editorial handle it.
  2. Duplicate the video clip and deliver it twice, once with each audio (as @amy outlined here).
  3. See below:

Start with the approach outlined in #2, then:

  1. mark out on clip 1 after the first audio cuts out
  2. mark in on clip 2, 1 frame after the mark out for clip1
  3. Add these two clips to a single reel
  4. Create a file-per-reel deliverable with a broadcast wave file output (like a prores proxy file with ‘both’ selected for audio)
  5. Take the broadcast wave generated in step 4 back into Cortex
  6. Sync this to the original, full length picture clip.

Definitely a pain.

Unfortunately, it would require significant changes under the hood in order to support natively.

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3

The problem I could see with method 3 is further down the pipeline with post. You would need to make sure that you pass this newly created WAV to whoever is doing final sound mix. Plus if any of the audio channels changed between aud1 and aud2, this could cause a headache (ok, a bigger headache). Probably not very likely, but still a concern.

I would recommend option 2 outlined above (dup video clip in Cortex, deliver twice). Don’t trim the portions or you may have burns in the middle of a take. (We have our burns at the head of all clips.) Then in Avid bring the two deliverables into a timeline, then make a subclip from the timeline. It would appear as one clip in Avid, but the two separate portions still stay separated and the finishing in post should work fine. We had to do this very thing a while back and we got no complaints from the finishing house (The sound recorded turned off midway through a take so we got slate clap and some dialog at beginning, then during a no-dialog part of the take the recorded reset. Then dialog was at the end of the take and the sound recorded caught it but on a different WAV file.)

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