Plural Eyes Sync Software Comes to Final Cut Pro X

By Danny Greer

Published: December 17, 2011 Last Updated: December 17, 2011

This week Singular Software released Plural Eyes for Final Cut Pro X as a free beta version.

Users of earlier versions of Final Cut Pro (as well as other editing apps) heralded Plural Eyes as an essential support application for working with DSLR footage. DSLR video has taken off in recent years…providing a cost-effective way to obtain really gorgeous footage. For editors however DSLR workflows present challenges, one of which is having to sync the DSLR footage with audio recorded on an external recorder (DSLR cams still have limited audio capabilities). Plural Eyes was created for automating the tedious task of synching audio and video tracks. It’s ease of use was astonishing and it took only seconds to sync an entire batch of clips (versus the hours it might take to manually sync them up).

When FCPX was announced at the Las Vegas Supermeet last spring, they stated that Final Cut Pro X would have similar sync capabilities built right into the program. I had assumed that meant the end for Plural Eyes (an application whose primary users were Final Cut Pro editors). However, this week’s announcement of FCPX support for the application thankfully proves otherwise.

Plural Eyes for Final Cut Pro X

Although Plural Eyes does have some of the same functionality as FCPX’s “Synchronize Clips” feature, it offers a bit more. FCPX still does not support multicam editing (at least not in the way we’re used to seeing in earlier FCP versions), but with Plural Eyes you can simulate multi cam by setting each camera as a different “track” and then syncing one piece of audio below all of them. This makes it quite easy to cut between the different cameras.

The only downside to using Plural Eyes versus FCPX’s built-in sync tool is that you must roundtrip out of the program using an XML file. You export an XML out of FCP, bring the XML into the Plural Eyes application where it creates a synched XML and then get dropped back into FCPX with a synched sequence. It’s a bit tedious (sounds it, right?), but still is a huge timesavings over manually synching audio and clips.

Currently, Singular Software is offering Plural Eyes for FCPX as a FREE beta version so there’s no risk to give it a test run to see how it fits into your post workflow. Plural Eyes is also avaliable for the most popular NLEs including FCPX, FCP, AVID, Premiere, Vegas Pro and Edius.

Aside from Plural Eyes support for FCPX, Singular Software also recently released Presto version 2, an application that automates the editing of video presentations.