Setting timecode in Premiere Pro by using file creation date of clips

Question

I have filmed a small rock concert with 4 cameras.

One of the cameras was filming short sequences (about 3 mins Clips), then paused for a few minutes and than resumed. Now it is quite a lot of work to synchronize These Clips. I'm using Premiere Pro and synchronizing by Audio is not working for those short Clips.

To solve this Problem I want to try to set the timecode of each Clip to the file creation date, which should be more or less relyable - and then do the fine Tuning Clip by Clip.

I use right click on a Clip, Modify>Timecode. But there I can only set the timecode at the beginning of the Clip (requires some calculation for each Clip).

Do you know an easy method to synchronize These Videos? Can Premere Pro 8.2 automatically set the timecode relative to the file creation date? How can I set the timecode at the END of a Clip?

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edit:

I used this CygWin script to get file creation Dates:

stat -c '%W %n' *.MOV | sort -k1n > creation-times.txt

and converted the timestamps in Excel with this formula:

= A1 / 86400 + 25569

Then I used this CygWin script to get Video Durations:

for f in *.MOV
do
  echo -n "$f;"
  /cygdrive/c/Path/MediaInfo_CLI_0.7.72_Windows_x64/MediaInfo.exe "$f" | awk -F: '/Duration/ { print $2; exit}'
done

Afterwards I used standard excel formulas to calculate the start-timecodes of those clips.

• https://www.cygwin.com/
• http://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo/Download/Windows

Answer 1

I'm not sure about how to set the timecode of the clip from the datestamp of the file but Red Giant have a fantastic plugin called Plural Eyes which does a great job of syncing multiple clips most of the time if the audio is even half decent.