Using Ardour to do film sound editing.

One of the reasons why I’ve shied away from Ardour was the lack of the ability to display ‘video’ synchronous with the play head on the audio tracks of Ardour.

I’ve downloaded a widget that was alleged to allow for a ‘video’ display that would be synchronized with Jack as used by Ardour…

I seem to get some sort of ‘working’, when I set the ‘positional sync source’ to JACK.

However, the ‘granularity’ is way off, I can only move the cursor to what appears to be 2 second marks. Is there a ‘snap to’ option that I need to set or unset?

Also, given that I have to select the frame rate in Ardour, does ‘Jadeo’ match up correctly, given that the ‘correct’ frame rate is entered?

http://ardour.org/files/reference/dsy142-ARDOUR.html#dsy142-ARDOUR

Should answer your question about the snap options nicely. In as far as TC, TC is primarily for Ardour to match with the framerate of the video in Jadeo for the purposes of the grid IIRC. Even if my memory is off however, I have never had any problem whatsoever provided a few simple rules…

One my previews/animatics/whatever I sync to are always rendered at the full frame rate of the video. Two I always set Ardour to that framerate. Three, set both Ardour and Jadeo to Jack sync. Never had any problems syncing Ardour to a video like this, and have done many projects like this.

Seablade

By far the biggest issue with using Ardour for film work is (or was) the fact that so many things stopped working properly at the high timecode values that are typically used by the film & television industries. Simple editing was usually okay but automation didn’t work at all and IIRC, the canvas itself ‘ran out’ at about 11 hours and something. I do know there were plans to fix these issues and work was definitely started but I think it got shelved until Ardour3. Not sure if it’s been finished yet but it’d be great news if it has!!

If your film is 11 hours long you’ve got bigger problems than Ardour running out of canvas :slight_smile:

I believe that was fixed some time back, though I haven’t done any work at those high values myself to be able to confirm.

   Seablade

@peder It is not uncommon for you to start TC at something other than 00:00:00, and especially when dealing with Audio and video sync’d on location sound, you might have TC values much higher as you record multiple takes and each take might have its own TC depending on the workflow.

  Seablade

@peder or if you are recording at actual time of day. You may have a half hour recording but it happened at 21:30 in the evening, so your TC position will reflect that.

Yeah, I think there was some confusion about how to connect the video to be synchronized via Jack, then the units for the grid, etc.

So I think this has solved my video+sound use problems for now.

For the foreseeable future, I’ll probably not have too many issues with large timecode values…