Workflow for TimeBolt if audio is recorded in a separate file?
Note: Only TimeBolt users who don’t want to use the Adobe Premiere Pro Extension, Davinci Resolve Integration or FCPXML Multi-cam should follow this workflow.
Overview
TimeBolt does silence detection on one file at a time. This is done by design as we believe it is a much better overall experience for silence detection and simpler to understand. Also, by using the SLOP shortcut keys in TimeBolt, you can finish auditing your edits within TimeBolt incredibly quickly.
But there are situations where you might have recorded the video and audio separately.
To add more context, we do have a Premiere Pro Extension that deals with this exact situation and also much more complex multi-camera set-ups… but I’m assuming you don’t want to use that process or you’re not a Premiere Pro subscriber.
The way I like to work with these types of files is by using DaVinci Resolve.
Resolve is a completely free to use software and it has some very neat features that will make our workflow very easy.
Downloads
Process
The issue with separate files comes mostly from alignment which can cause the audio and video to go out of sync. Aligment issues come when your audio and video don’t start at the same time. For example, when you’re recording… you turn your microphone on before you hit record on your camera. This causes the audio to be ahead of your video. We’ll be using Resovle to solve this.
Resolve has a feature called Auto Align Clips → Based on Waveform. This feature analyses the audio in the clips and aligns them perfectly on the Timeline. From there you can replace the audio in the video file with the audio from your audio file and render out the file for TimeBolt.
Drop the perfectly synced file into TimeBolt and get your edited file in seconds!
Watch the video for a full walkthrough.