Adobe Premiere - How to sync multiple Video Feeds? Need Help

[Rogalon]

Hi there,
Up until now i only cut small videos in premiere. Works wonderful. But now I have to do something completely new... I have three video-feeds from a live gig of a local band. The feeds where filmed with Mini-DV Cameras and I have successfully imported all three videos to my harddisk. The Sound is recorded on Dat. (And also already transferred to my computer)
No I have to cut the three videos into one. - Switch from one to another in the final version. How can I do this, using Adobe Premiere. Is there a way to Sync all the three feeds once to the audio feed (how?) and than just "jump" - between the sources. You know what I mean. I don't want to sync little bits of video for every cut I make. Can anyone give me a hint or a link to a good tutorial, explaining how to da this? Please. Thx.

Bye, Rogalon.

[Trust_No_1]

Ok, from what I understand - you have 3 sets of video which share the same single audio source. To make your editing easier you need to first sync the audio to each piece of video. This way you can edit with everything on the timeline. Here's a suggestion on how you can do it:

1) Add the audio to each individual piece of video.
Your timeline should look like this:

V3 - Video 3
V2 - Video 2
V1 - Video 1
A1 - DAT Audio

2) Save the individual videos along with audio.
Export the timeline for each separate video track plus the audio track. E.g. Mute tracks V3 and V2 but export V1 and A1 , mute tracks V3 and V1 but export V2 and A1, mute tracks V2 and V1 but export V3 and A1, etc. Save as DV format.

3) You should now have 3 sets of video (with audio) files.

4) You can now add the new video files to the timeline and edit as normal.

You may have to manually adjust the position of the video tracks in step 1 to ensure that everything is in sync with the audio before you export. This should not be a problem as long as each video shares the same audio.

You will also need to remove the original audio from each video capture (if you have not done so already). This can be done by just muting the video capture audio.

Good luck!

[housepig]

I've seen a tutorial for doing this in Vegas which had a really good idea on how to do it...

once you have your three video tracks in sync with your audio, resize them and move them so you can see each simultaneously in the preview window (ie resize them all to 1/4 size and arrange them in a block of 4, 2 over 2.. since you only have three video feeds, you'll have a blank block in there).

figure out which keystroke combination will place a marker (or make a key combination so you can do it on the fly).

play the video, and watch your three feeds... every time you want to switch from one feed to another, hit your key stroke and drop a marker.

if you really want to get fancy, add another audio track and route your computer mic to it, and every time you switch tracks you can record yourself saying "track one", "track two", etc... whichever track you're switching to.

once you're done, if there's a way to split video alone markers, do it. then add another video track, un-resize your video tracks and copy the pieces you want to the final composite track.

it's been a while since I worked with premiere, so I don't know if this would work, but if it will, it might be an approach to try. It works in Vegas predominately because it has a realtime preview window, and it will split files at marker tracks and allow you to drop markers with minimal keystrokes.

[Rogalon]

Thx. That thing with the multiple previews transformed into one sounds good. Gotta get an update to Premiere 6.5 though...