I am volunteer editing a production with professional sound recording and need to deliver picture lock to the audio dept so they can add foley, mix, and master. I've delivered a few tests, but it's clear that the workflow needs improvement. In the first test, I just edited and delivered camera scratch audio, but the audio dept isn't able to re-sync the master recordings to camera scratch. Second test worked for them, but made my edit timeline a nightmare with 8x more audio tracks visible than necessary. Looking for a better way to work. Goals are:
• Sync Zoom 8-channel (per file) .WAV files to camera, either via waveform or timecode, maintaining camera timecode. This is the easy part.
• Combine synced A/V into “Merged Clips” (or any outside-the-box method of syncing audio to video) where the resulting clip channel format is “multichannel,” not “mono,” so that editing all eight channels into an adaptive audio timeline track results in a single track, not eight.
• Output stems for final mixdown with synced proxy video. Quicktime container format worked to transfer 8 streams of mono from 8 separate mono timeline tracks (A1-A8), but a better solution moving forward should use “8-mono mapped to Adaptive” clips, nested in adaptive audio timeline tracks (just A1). The resulting file must be multichannel, whether it’s 8 streams of mono or one stream of 8-mono, etc. I’d prefer a more compressed video codec than prores proxy.
•Give the sound guy an .AAF, .XML, or similar, which accurately conveys the edited timeline with references to the original 8-channel .WAV files. This is the ultimate goal. The particular DAW he's using is Reaper, but DAW-agnostic answers are preferable.