in Premiere Pro if you sync many different cameras and audio to timecode
you may be familiar with a timeline that looks something like this
now personally I don't think anybody got time for that so in this tutorial I want
to show you how to multicam sync in Premiere Pro and get every single camera
on a specific track with the click of a button when you do do a proper multicam
sequence sync recently I was fortunate enough to be an editor on some sports
Doc's specials for Fox, CBS, and ABC. And this technique alone saved me days of
organizing in the Edit and we could turn around our edits faster for those
extremely tight deadlines so I hope what I've learned can help you exponentially
in the future let's go ahead and dive into Premiere Pro in this example I'm
going to be syncing to timecode a whole day's worth of footage from four
separate RED cameras as well as two audio people everyone was running off
the same time code so hopefully this is a great example to showcase how quick
this technique works I like dragging in my files from the Media Browser inside
Premiere Pro if you want to learn how to import R3D files specifically into
Premiere Pro the correct way you can check out my video here in the corner
once everything's in the project bin I like to get rid of any subfolders and
move all Clips directly up the hierarchy to underneath either A, B, C, or D cam
folders so if you were to click on the A cam folder all of the footage from that
day from A cam is right there there's no clips buried underneath any other
subfolders this next part is the most important part but could get overlooked
by most editors because we have to utilize the meta data display window and
assigning a camera label to our clips so I'm gonna highlight all of the clips in
my A cam folder go up to help and in the search bar I'm going to start typing in
"meta" and then I'm gonna go click metadata to bring up the metadata
display window in that display window I'm gonna click on the three bars next
to the word metadata to bring up the submenu and scroll down to metadata
display in the search bar of this window we're going to type in the words camera
label underneath dynamic media we're going to turn on camera label let me
rearrange and make my project bin a little bit bigger so you can understand
what's going on now in the metadata display there's two
ways that you can get to camera label the first way is if you were to go to
this little search bar in the metadata display window and type in the words
camera label that will bring it up underneath dynamic media the other way
is to physically uncheck dynamic media and scroll down to camera label with all
of my a cam Clips highlighted in the project bin I'm going to assign the
camera label A to them now whenever I click on any of those clips in the
project bin they will automatically have the metadata of camera label A assigned
to them. I'm going to repeat this process for cam B so highlight all of the clips
underneath Cam B and type in B in the camera label metadata display and just
to show you all of these clips now have the camera label B metadata attached to
them I repeat the process for cameras C and D and we will also need to assign
a camera label to our audio to make sure that that is on a separate track as well
and I like to assign the letter Z to my audio because most of the time you're
not going to have that many cameras going up to the letter Z now I'm going
to minimize all of my camera in sound folders highlight them all right click
and scroll down to create multi camera source sequence up top you can retitle
the name of the sequence but the main thing we want to make sure is checked
off here is a synchronization point by timecode and then create single multicam
source sequence and have the track assignments by camera label now we're
going to be able to have that single track per camera because we did
everything in the metadata beforehand the last thing that's up to you is
whether you want to move your source Clips into a specific processed pin or
not I choose not to move them into the bin because I've already done all the
work to organize my clips into the specific cameras in my project bin hit
OK and within a couple seconds we've now created a multicam sequence with
everything synced by timecode in the project bin
I'm going to right click my multicam sequence scroll down to open in timeline
and there you have a beautiful timeline of all of your video and audio clips
synced to timecode with each camera that you labeled
on its separate track now everything's not perfect with this technique one of
the hiccups that a lot of you will encounter is if you have a camera man
that is switching between recording in real time and then recording slow-mo
footage the slow-mo footage on that track will have the correct start time
in the timecode but the problem is that the slow-mo will overlap into other
clips as you can see right here with this footage that I imported a couple
days ago also if you were using a camera that wasn't synced to the external
timecode you'll probably just end up with a stack of files at the beginning
of your sequence like this but going back to our first example if you want to
check how things are synced in the timeline by just a visual representation
you can go up to the program monitor right click and we're going to turn on
overlays now we can reference what the timecode of all of the specific clips
underneath the playhead at that specific point are in accordance to what the
timecode is showing us on the Premiere Pro timeline if something's a little off
it may be because there has been some drift throughout the day in the timecode
or maybe there was just something else wonky going on but this does give you a
great starting point visually on whether things are in sync, near sync, or
precisely to timecode. Another thing to point out is that the sequence that
we've generated does not start at the time code of zero it actually starts at
whatever the first clips timecode was so if you want to change that you can go to
the sequence on your timeline click the three bars and then click start time
here is where you could change the start time of your sequence if you're working
with a team of editors and it's your responsibility to sync the day's footage
just like I've shown you and you need to pass off that Premiere Pro project file
to the rest of your team let me show you what I would do in order to share your
sequence with the rest of your team highlight that sequence in the project
bin go to file export selection as Premiere Pro project and now you are
saving a Premiere Pro project file that will open up and only have that synced
sequence in it along with all the clips that are associated with that sequence
if this tutorial was helpful for you could you leave me a thumbs up on the
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next episode hope you're out there living a life of abundance