Synchronizing Your Footage

Before you stitch your video, you need to synchronize all the individual raw clips. Autopano Video makes this process easy. There are two main ways to synchronize your clips:

Synchronize using audio
Synchronize using motion

Audio Sync

Synchronizing using audio is usually your best choice. Using this method, Autopano Video will scan your audio’s raw footage for matching sounds. In order for this to work, all of your footage needs to have fairly clear, distinct audio tracks. This is why we clap at the beginning and end of our clips. It makes audio sync simple.

We clap at the beginning and end of our footage to make audio sync easy.

Autopano Video scans for distinct audio signals to align your footage.

Audio sync won’t work if your footage was recorded outside in a very noisy environment. For example, you might be unable to acoustically sync footage recorded on a motorcycle with lots of wind in the background.

Motion Sync

A fallback option is to sync using motion. In this case, Autopano Video performs a motion vector analysis on your footage and temporally aligns your footage using that information. This is a great choice if your footage has noisy audio.

Example of motion vector analysis.

Syncing Footage in Autopano Video

TIP: Click the audio preview button so you can hear your audio.

To get started, click the Synchro button at the top of the screen.

Click the Synchro button to start the sync

You’ll see a bunch of options appear at the left. These options allow you to control the method of sync and to review the determined sync offsets.

Sync options

Go ahead and click the Use audio to synchronize button. With the default settings, Autopano Video will search each clip for 30 seconds ahead of the current play position and 30 seconds behind it.

Once the sync frame offsets are determined, you’ll see them populate in Start time and Nearest frame columns. Go ahead and play the footage. You’ll see everything now lines up nicely.

After syncing, your clips have start time offsets and nearest frames.

Click Apply to save your changes. Also, now is a good time to save your project into the “Autopano Video” folder.

Saving Projects

It’s important to note that Autopano Video does not have undo. This means that you should save many versions of your projects as you progress. Get into the habit of saving a new version of your project every time you make a change.

OK. Let’s move on and talk about stitching!