Aligning video from multiple cameras in post-processing

[mzellers]

Does anyone know of a plugin for Adobe Premiere, or perhaps a video editor that can take video from multiple consumer-grade camcorders and align them such that you can cut and fade between them as if you were doing a live shoot?

I have video from our wedding (now many years ago), that I have always intended to edit together, and I can imagine that such a tool would be helpful.

Ideally, it would use the sound tracks to try to align the video. I could imagine that the timestamp meta-data might also be helpful (but it would not be able to assume that the clocks were exactly synchronized).

[Cornucopia]

This is known as "multicamera" in addition to layered tracks. All pro NLEs can do that.

When you say "align", I'm assuming you mean in TIME, not in SPACE. You want 2 cams that shot the same event to be sync'ed up so that they can be inter-cut.

Rarely would you align in space unless you were doing a sterescopic shoot, because there would be too many variables to control (zoom, focus, tilt/cant, DOF, distance, height, resolution).

Either way, you WOULD still want to match white balance, light levels, etc between the cameras. This is known as color matching/correction/grading.

You can only align video via sound if the sound arrival time (the time it took for a sound to get to the microphone) is identical between the 2 cameras and the mike quality/specs are VERY, VERY, VERY similar. Otherwise, your waveforms won't match anyway.

It's obviously too late after-the-fact this time, but normally one should ALWAYS slate & clapper when shooting multiple cameras. For this very reason (as well as others). This time, I'm guessing you'll just have to do it manually, slipping & sliding one track against another and previewing (maybe side-by-side) until you get them as close to in sync as possible. It'll never be, or stay, exactly in sync, unless you had used pro cameras genlocked via a common master source.

Scott

[poisondeathray]

To align clips in time (sync the clips), one option is Singular Plural Eyes (bought by Red Giant)