As much as we DITs try to avoid it, on smaller productions we are sometimes tasked with duties traditionally done by an assistant editor. One of those jobs includes syncing audio. Imagine this scenario: you have 4 channels of production audio with timecode that does not match the camera footage. You pop open Redcine-X and get to work manually syncing audio for dailies, a process that is time consuming but relatively painless.
There are a few downsides to using Redcine-X. The metadata that links your audio file to your r3d file is fragile and prone to breaking if footage is moved to another system or folder. The other issue is that Quicktime exports reduce multichannel production audio to simple stereo, a result that doesn’t save time as the assistant editor will have to resync production audio in their NLE.
After syncing audio manually, I like batch exporting all the clips I’ve worked on as BFW (Broadcast Wave File) in Redcine-X. This creates a WAV file for each video clip named the same as my video clip, striped with matching timecode, and with all my selected audio channels. At this point you may choose to export or not the camera’s scratch audio tracks, this choice can be set when you create your export preset.
Now that you’ve created these files, you have a few more options with your audio workflow:
Hopefully you can see the value in exporting a set of audio files with the same name and timecode as your footage. It’s a small investment in hard drive space that can save time and headache in a number of workflow scenarios.