Guide Track to Guide Track match? Or waveform match?

Matchbox
#1

Hi humans,
I handed a director an 8 channel polywav with TC for him to cut to picture.
It seems he ignored the polywav and has been working with a mono bouncedown of it, so I can’t expand the tracks to get my ISOs now. Better, his bouncedown did not carry over correct TC metadata. Field Recorder Guide Track was a bust.

There is no “old” picture- shoot was 8 people recording their individual Zoom screens and Audio. I manually sync’d 8 channels together and created a polywav to keep everything together while he edited.

Is there any chance I can feed Matchbox a mono guide from our full 2hr record, and a mono guide from his 14 minute edit and have my tracks conform to his edit? My first attempt at this was not fruitful.

Am I SOL?

1 Like
#2

In theory, that should work… but the downmix to mono would have to be done the same way, preferably in the same software. If you could get hold of the editors mono file which he cut with, you should be in business.

You’d ask for a mixdown of their latest cut and compare the 2.

TBH, as of v1.1.3 the GT matchup is more fragile than we’d like. The algorithm is due for another work-over pretty soon, so keep an eye on the release notes.

#3

Appreciate the reply! I’ll get ahold of those files, and see if I have any luck.

#4

Unfortunately there is not much working here. I uploaded two .wav files of the source material that was used to edit this 13 minute clip, and Matchbox is only spotting two or 2 little bits. Nothing much to work with. I wonder if this is just user error as this is my first rodeo since switching from Conformalizer.
Attaching a screen grab below too!

Screen Shot 2020-11-20 at 3.43.41 PM
Screen Shot 2020-11-20 at 3.43.41 PM1196×774 49.7 KB

#5

It’s probably being fooled by mix changes. Hard to say without looking at the files but I appreciate that’s probably not possible. If you can, send to support at thecargocult.nz

#6

Can you get an AAF from the picture editor with infinite handles on the clips? It will be pretty large in size, but you could at least then manually trim out the top of each clip which should land you at the beginning of your original file start every time, then snap your polys to the head of each of those. I’ve had to do that before, but not on the scale of a 2hr source file. If there are 50 cuts, there will be 50x’s 2hrs worth of audio in the bin.

I realize this is not a solution using Matchbox, but, just something to try if you’re still in a pickle.

I’m super-digging how Matchbox is working for me and my crew.

#7

Yeah, I definitely appreciate that ability, but at that point I’d just tell them to hire an assistant editor and sort this out.
We’re trying to get an AAF from him with timecode not that is not messed up that references the correct location in my source .wav files. If that works I should be able to link by timecode at least. Truly a pickle.

#8

Do we know if thre will be an update soon that may help the guide track match work a little better?

#9

Yes, this is high on the priority list for Matchbox.

2 Likes
#10

Hey Cargo Cult. I work for an audio only media company (narrative podcast, talk shows, etc.) where we aren’t dealing with picture changes or locked picture. Something we often run into as that the composer will make timing changes to timing of dialogue and sfx stems and then we have to reconform the session to match music and prepare for mix.

So far, I have not been able to get matchbox to work for me consistently here. Even a few small cuts and rearrangements to the dialogue stem throws off the algo and no matches are detected.

Would love to know if improvements for audio only matching are planned, otherwise ill just have to keep reconforming manually :sweat_smile: Thanks!

#11

OK, so if you’re dealing with combined mixes of MX, FX and DX, then yeah - it’s probably gonna have trouble.
The reason is that it can’t extract just the DX from that mix and use that as the basis for finding the timing changes. If the DX moves but the music doesn’t, Matchbox won’t be able to properly find sections of audio.
So it’s not really a “bug” that we can fix - it’s an issue with your workflow.

On the other hand, if you have stems then you should be able to do this without any trouble. Hit us up on the support @ email address if this is the case.

#12

Strange, that is how I am using it with separated stems. I’ll email support. Thanks!