Ask Slashdot: Synchronizing Sound With Video, Using Open Source?

An anonymous reader writes: I have a decent video camera, but it lacks a terminal for using an external mic. However, I have a comparatively good audio recorder. What I'd like to do is "automagically" synchronize sound recorded on the audio recorder with video taken on the video camera, using Free / Open Source software on Linux, so I can dump in the files from each, hit "Go," and in the end I get my video, synched with the separately recorded audio, in some sane file format. This seems simple, but maybe it isn't: the 800-pound gorilla in the room is PluralEyes, which evidently lots of people pay $200 for --and which doesn't have a Linux version. Partly this is that I'm cheap, partly it's that I like open source software for being open source, and partly it's that I already use Linux as my usual desktop, and resent needing to switch OS to do what seems intuitively to be a simple task. (It seems like something VLC would do, considering its Swiss-Army-Knife approach, but after pulling down all the menus I could find, I don't think that's the case.) I don't see this feature in any of the Open Source video editing programs, so as a fallback question for anyone who's using LiVES, KDEnlive, or other free/Free option, do you have a useful workflow for synching up externally recorded sound? I'd be happy even to find a simple solution that's merely gratis rather than Free, as long as it runs on Ubuntu.

Comments

Sync to the audio

[linuxwrangler]

Don't sync to the video, sync to the audio. Your video recorder records the audio "reference" track and you just sync your externally recorded audio to the reference track. Kdenlive has this feature. Other editors may a well.

Re:Sync to the audio

[Fone626]

The above is totally correct, I use a separate recorder all the time so that I get better quality audio than my video recorder will supply, and then use Kdenlive to align the audio to the camera's reference audio.

I've actually made a video that includes how to do it (among other features), and the video itself uses the Align Audio to Reference feature:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIO73t228k0

Here's a short text version:
https://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manual/Timeline/Right_Click_Menu

A/V sync command line

[mungewell]

I had a recent project which needed to sync Audio from recorder with video from several cameras. I found this project on GitHub which has a command line tool to measure the delta between the high quality audio from recorder and the low quality from the cameras, and then I could just put this offset in my video editor when inserting the clips.

https://github.com/allisonnico...