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I'm going to be recording some audio in a studio, and would like to also document each take by video. Then I can put together a live video when I'm done the audio track.

My question is, how!?

I could

a) leave a marker in both the audio and video track by clapping into a mic, giving me a placeholder to manually line them up...

or

b) somehow sync my Pro Tools rig to my Canon T3i (or a laptop with the Canon connected to it) so that I have a single transport control, and a serial number on each take, both audio and video...

I'm familiar with most aspects of Pro Tools, but very new to video....

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I would go with the clapper method, I have been using it for some time and never had an issue with it. As mentioned it will drift over time but this depends on clip length. Movies and the such typically contain short clips so the drift wont be a huge issue. If you are shooting something like an interview that may just be one long running shot you may notice more drift.

As for syncing them with the T3i I dont know of a way to do it as I dont know if the T3i can output a time code or take on in, or output a sync pulse of any kind for that matter. That being said I dont own one so I'm not totally sure of this.

Another option is to use a third unit to capture both audio and video. By routing the video from the camera into a recording deck and routing the audio from your mixer or preamp into the same deck you can record on a single storage medium with multiple sources, this will prevent you from having to sync later. These kinds of rigs tend to be less portable and if you are shooting in the field this may not be a reality.

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  • I'm going to clap it. The clips won't be longer than 2 minutes at a time, and I'm going to try Pluraleyes to match them all together afterwards.
    – derjur
    Dec 2, 2014 at 18:12
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here are a few clues :

  • as your protools rig and the camera do not share a common clock reference, their respective speeds will slowly drift and you will notice that on long takes, even if you sync their starting point, they will end slightly out of sync on the editing software timeline.

  • the easiest workflow in your case, because it doesn't require any additional gear, is to use the clapping methode you mention. You could also record a raw mix out of the protools into the camera and use this track as an help to resync these two elements.

  • be careful that audio+video post production requires the audio to be recorded at 48 kHz, whereas your music workflow is probably based on a 44.1 kHz protools session. You might have to process your final mix (@44.1) to do a sampling frequency conversion (to 48 kHz) to import audio into your picture editing software.

Another option is to use the Pluraleyes software (http://www.redgiant.com/products/all/pluraleyes/) that will auto-magically synchronise your video elements containing the raw mix with your audio files, provided the raw mix on the camera is quite similar to your final mix.

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  • Thanks for the tip! I'm not terribly worried about drift, since the clips will all be relatively short. I'll give that software a look though. Automation is certainly friendly.
    – derjur
    Nov 29, 2014 at 13:37

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