Avid Tip
That Syncing Feeling -
One Frame Or Two?by Tod Modisett & Scott Burnette
If you sync your dailies in telecine, and especially if your mixer is using DATs, there will often be sync problems with your tapes. This phenomenon was first brought to my attention while working on an independent feature. My editor had never worked on the Avid before; initially he asked me a lot of questions, some of which seemed self-explanatory, just to be sure that he completely understood everything that was going on. It was a good thing he did, because one day over lunch he asked why the audio scrub on the frame advance was occasionally off by a few frames. I told him it shouldn't be. After checking the clips in question we discovered that, indeed, some of our takes weren't in sync. The clap was sometimes out by as many as four frames; more common were shots that were one or two frames out. It was something that had never even occurred to me to check.
When I talked to the colorist at our facility about it, I was told that they only guaranteed sync within a frame. I have since heard this "guarantee" repeated at other facilities, but at the time I was flabbergasted. I only started assisting in the '90s, so I really have no idea what an editor would have said to an assistant twenty years ago who told him that he would only guarantee sync within a frame. It couldn't have been pretty, though.
Sitting in with the colorist during the next session, I saw first-hand why sync can be so tricky in telecine. Even though he lined up the clap perfectly, the DAT slipped a frame in pre-roll and the take was laid down a frame out. No one could give me a definitive cause for this DAT deck slip, other than to shrug and say that "...different decks have different specs."
Given the arbitrary nature of the DAT slipping, it seemed impractical to have the facility retransfer the material. It would have prevented them from keeping up with dailies.
So, here's the fastest, and best, workaround I've come up with to resync shots in the Avid.
Drag your out-of-sync clip into a new bin - usually I name it the "Sync Bin." "Unlink" the media from the clip (hold down shift-control, then go under the "Clip" menu). Then "duplicate" the clip (command-D), thereby creating two clips with the same timecode information. To one clip name, I add the suffix 'VID,' to the other the suffix 'AUD.' Highlight the VID clip and "modify" it so that it only has one track, the video track. To the other, modify it so it only has the two audio tracks. Highlight the two altered clips and "relink to master."
Now one clip only has the take's video and the other only has the take's audio. Pop up the video, find the clap, and mark an "in." Do the same for your audio, finding the clap by scrolling forward frame by frame with your caps-lock down. Mark your "in." Highlight both clips and go to "AutoSync" under the "Bin" menu. A new subclip will now appear, and your clip will be in sync.
This Method's Advantages
The advantage to resyncing the shot this way, as opposed to doing it in a sequence, is that the new subclip will behave in the cut as a normal clip: if it's accidently thrown out of sync, those helpful little white numbers ('sync breaks') will appear to tell the editor just how far out it is. The other benefit, of course, is that you don't have to waste time redigitizing anything. The only drawback I've come across is that the sound TC burn-in window will no longer match your log. You should therefore check your log against your window before you resync to ensure that you'll be able to trust your lists later.
Although it seems complicated at first glance, once you actually do it a few times this technique is fairly quick. Just recently I was given a dailies tape where over half the shots were out of sync and, while annoying, it didn't slow our work down at all.
It will be interesting to see if dailies' syncing gets better or worse with time. My own experience has been that around 10% of the shots on any given tape are out of sync. That percentage seems to be increasing, and this perceived increase is independent of the transfer house doing the work. If this problem persists, it will be yet another reason to give up on telecine sync altogether and instead opt to digitize and sync your audio directly from the production DATs.
If anyone has a better resyncing method, war stories about telecine sync, or an idea as to why DAT decks "slip", please email us. We'd love to hear from you.
