What are people's experiences with Auto-Align-Post?

[KingTor]

Originally Posted by Ryan Young

Ha, fair enough of a question. Here's my extreme and ridiculous example.

Let's say it's a shot of someone 200 feet away hitting a snare drum, just once. There's a shotgun mic near the camera (200' away from the drummer), and the drummer has a lav on.

The sound of the shotgun would be delayed compared to what we're seeing on-camera much more than the "direct" source of the dummer's lav because of how long it takes for the sound to travel that distance. So, my reasoning is like the lav is like a direct feed versus the "live" feed, so to speak. Obviously, in that situation, the boom would be aligned, unless you wanted the realism of distance, right?

When you figure this one out, maybe you can figure out how to do thunder coming after the lightning with someone flagging it for the sound effect being out of sync. :)

Yeah, you pretty much have to like up the boom to the lav in that example. Too much reality tends to be distracting.

smart phone my ass

[Ryan Young]

Haha!
Glad I got the “theory” questioning out of my head.

Well, I’m thoroughly enjoying having Auto-Align in my arsenal. Having just finished my first project with it, and quickly realized why “syncing” the lav to the boom is preferred. It’s most apparent with scenes with two or more who speak. If there are 3 people, the boom will have varying delays with each “direct” radio mic, so aligning the boom was much more likely to get weird artifacts with all the aligning.

Aligning the few radio clips that I found were needed to mix with the booms was easier and only tried to align that person against the boom, not everyone in the boom track to the multiple radios. It also looked more in sync and natural to use the boom as the anchor. I found that the other way around I was frame-fudging one character a frame here and there to check its sync. Very weird!

Originally Posted by KingTor

When you figure this one out, maybe you can figure out how to do thunder coming after the lightning with someone flagging it for the sound effect being out of sync. :)

Yeah, you pretty much have to like up the boom to the lav in that example. Too much reality tends to be distracting.

smart phone my ass

[LDS]

Originally Posted by minister

If you are using the boom and it's "timing" 9/10 times, why change the timing for the 1/10 times?

I think the opposite is implied - prefer the sound of booms, prefer the timing of lavs. It really should be splitting hairs, as 3 meters of distant from the source equates to just 1ms of difference in timing... but I too have landed on booms aligned to lavs. It is more work, but it sounds tighter and more consistent than the opposite way around.

Auto Align Post is definitely an amazing tool!

[alexbooy]

Keep in mind that radio mikes might have delay time because of digital processing. And in most recorders one can change track delay times. So some mixers fiddle around with this possibility. So I think syncing to a boom is more secure ( as long as it is hard wired). Great plugin. Saves me days.
Alex

[Vedat]

Originally Posted by Reckless Erik

Actually I find Defaulter inconsistent. It may work fine on long clips but watch out on a short one! This is rather off topic though.

You'll be pleased to know we're working on an update that'll have extra controls along with the addition of K-weighting operation.

Don't mean to hijack the thread. As you were...

[TheMuffinMan01]

It's really situational which mic to align to the other isn't it? If you have a very strong boom that's doing 80 percent of the work, and you just need to fill in a little bit with lavs, then you would align the lavs to the boom. But if the lav is the dominant mic, and the boom is pretty wide, then aligning the lav to the boom would mess with your dominant signal affecting clarity. Then there is all sorts of middle ground... I still haven't figured out how to handle every situation and I think there are some situations that auto align doesn't do any help at all... but I definitely don't think that one solution fits all scenarios and projects. Not to diminish how helpful it is in many situations.

[Reckless Erik]

Nice to hear Vedat